Queen Victoria

  3 Ibid. August 9th 1851.

  4 Queen Victoria to the Lord Chancellor, December 20th 1859.

  5 RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ (W) March 19th 1865.

  6 Ibid. June 28th 1858.

  7 Ibid. October 29th 1850.

  8 Ibid. July 1st 1852.

  9 Ibid. June 27th 1850.

  10 Connell, Regina v Palmerston, p. 95.

  11 Morning Chronicle, June 26th 1850, p. 2.

  12 Palmerston, Hansard, June 1850.

  13 RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ (W) February 4th 1850.

  14 Ibid. January 30th 1850.

  15 Ibid. January 30th 1850.

  16 Ibid. February 14th 1850.

  17 Connell, Regina v Palmerston, p. 102.

  18 RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ (W) February 24th 1850.

  19 Connell, Regina v Palmerston, p. 74.

  20 RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ (W) August 7th 1850.

  21 Ibid. August 15th 1850.

  22 Ibid. August 15th 1850.

  23 Ibid. September 9th 1850.

  24 Ibid. September 9th 1850.

  25 Ibid. September 14th 1850.

  26 Ibid. October 11th 1850.

  27 Ibid. March 3rd 1851.

  28 Ibid. October 14th 1851.

  29 Ibid. October 24th 1851.

  30 Ibid. October 31st 1851.

  31 Ibid. October 31st 1851.

  32 Ibid. November 13th 1851.

  33 Ibid. March 6th 1853.

  34 Ibid. December 11th 1851.

  35 Russell to Palmerston, December 17th 1851.

  36 RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ (W) December 20th 1851.

  37 Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper, February 1st 1852, p. 1.

  38 RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ (W) December 17th 1852.

  39 Ibid. December 19th 1852.

  40 RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ (W) January 1st 1854.

  41 See Hugh Small, The Crimean War, Tempus Publishing, 2007 for a provocative discussion on the Crimean War.

  42 Queen Victoria to the King of Prussia, March 17th 1854.

  43 RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ (W) October 23rd 1853.

  44 Ibid. December 15th 1853.

  45 Brown, Palmerston, p. 367.

  46 The Times, January 24th, 1854, p. 8.

  47 Ibid. November 2nd, 1854, p. 6.

  48 Norman McCord, ‘Lord Aberdeen’ in Blake, The Prime Ministers, p. 64.

  49 Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper, December 25th 1853.

  50 See Rhodes James, Albert, Prince Consort, p. 222.

  51 Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper, December 8th 1853.

  52 Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, January 8th 1854.

  53 Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser, December 24th 1853.

  54 Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper, December 25th 1853.

  55 Ibid. January 8th 1854.

  56 RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ (W) January 4th 1854 .

  57 Quoted in Rhodes James, Albert, Prince Consort, p. 222.

  58 RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ (W) January 26th 1854.

  59 Ibid. January 26th 1854.

  60 Ibid. May 10th 1854.

  61 Ibid. October 9th 1854.

  62 Ibid. November 30th 1854.

  63 Magnus, Gladstone, p. 118.

  64 RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ (W) December 26th 1854.

  65 Ibid. January 17th 1855.

  66 Ibid. October 18th 1854.

  67 Ibid. September 21st 1856.

  68 Ibid. November 12th 1854.

  69 The Times, November 2nd 1854, p. 6.

  70 Ibid. November 2nd 1854, p. 6.

  71 RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ (W) November 25th 1854.

  72 Ibid. November 26th 1854.

  73 John Heathcot Amory quoted in The Times, February 13th 1855, p. 8.

  74 RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ (W) January 31st 1855.

  75 Quoted in Brown, Palmerston, p. 377.

  76 Victoria to Leopold, February 6th 1855.

  77 RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ (W) September 10th 1855.

  78 Ibid. March 3rd 1855.

  79 Ibid. November 28th 1855.

  80 Ibid. May 18th 1855.

  81 Ibid. March 11th 1856.

  82 Ibid. March 30th 1856.

  83 Ibid. March 13th 1856.

  84 Ibid. July 8th 1856.

  85 Ibid. June 26th, 1857.

  86 Ibid. August 21st 1856.

  87 Ibid. February 25th 1856.

  88 Ibid. July 1st 1857.

  89 Ibid. August 1st 1857.

  90 Ibid. August 3rd 1857.

  91 Ibid. August 31st 1857.

  92 Ibid. December 14th 1857.

  93 Ibid. July 16th 1857.

  94 Victoria to Palmerston July 19th 1857, quoted in Connell, Regina v Palmerston, p. 220.

  95 Byron Farwell, Queen Victoria’s Little Wars, Victorian Book Club, 1973, p. 97.

  96 RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ (W) November 1st 1857.

  97 Quoted in Hibbert, Queen Victoria, p. 250.

  98 Quoted in Brown, Palmerston, p. 407.

  99 RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ (W) November 23rd 1857.

  100 Ibid. January 28th 1858.

  101 Ibid. June 11th 1859.

  102 Ibid. June 11th 1859.

  103 Ibid. August 5th 1859.

  104 Ibid. September 7th 1859.

  105 Ibid. November 23rd 1859.

  106 Ibid. January 5th 1860.

  107 Ibid. January 13th 1860.

  7 Life after Albert: 1861–1868

  On 16 March 1861 Victoria lamented ‘the dreaded calamity’ which had befallen her ‘which seems like an awful dream, from which I cannot recover. My precious darling Mother has been taken from us. . . . She breathed her last, my hand holding hers to the last moment.’1 The Duchess of Kent had died and the Queen was distraught. She confided to Albert that she now regretted the sorrow and distress that her ‘beloved Mama had often undergone and the misunderstandings, so often caused by others’.2 Victoria was experiencing the natural grief of a daughter, tortured by the memory of her teenage behaviour when she had been unable to assess her mother’s strengths clearly.

  Victoria’s mother’s death was the prelude to a much bigger, much less expected death. Later that year, on 14 December 1861, Albert died from what was diagnosed by his doctors as typhoid: he was 42 years old, the same age as Victoria. The shock of Albert’s early death was too much for the Queen, who suffered from all the normal stages of grief, vacillating between denial, depression and anger. She wrote to her eldest daughter crying, ‘How am I, who leant on him for all and everything – without whom I did nothing, moved not a finger, arranged not a print or photograph, didn’t put on a gown or bonnet – to live?’3 The Queen arranged for Albert’s clothes to be laid out each evening, and hot water and a clean towel placed for him to shave, a ritual which was still being observed more than twenty years later. Each night she slept with Albert’s coat over her, his dressing gown near her and his night gown close to her face. If she could smell him, then he remained alive. She went on ‘a kind of pilgrimage’ to the places that Albert had been: to his home in Germany, even to the place he shot his last stag.

  Victoria’s mourning permeated the Palace but her royal status prevented anyone comforting her since ‘in a court grounded in formality and protocol, they could hardly give her a hug or hold her hand’.4 The Queen wailed in her all-consuming grief that ‘there is noone to call me Victoria now’. With Albert and her mother both dead, Victoria had no adult to put her as first in their lives: her eldest daughter Vicky was 21 and married, her youngest only four. Vicky was told that four-year-old Beatrice was the

  only thing I feel keeps me alive, for she alone wants me really . . . the wretched, broken-hearted mother . . . is now daily learning to feel that she is only No 3 or 4 in the real tender love of others. And dear child, all this is right and natural, but to me most agonizing . . . the belonging to no one, any more.5

  At the moment of her greatest need, the Queen was left with no adult in whom she could confide, no one to share her thoughts, no one to turn to for sympathy or guidance – and no one with the authority to curb her unaccountable caprices and idiosyncratic behaviour. In time it became apparent that the Queen had no wi
sh to be relieved of her excruciating unbearable pain, and preferred to wallow in her anguish, to the detriment of her sanity, the needs of her children, the demands of the government and, perhaps more importantly, her popularity with the British people.

  During the first few weeks after Albert’s death, the Queen depended on her 18-year-old daughter Alice for emotional support. This young woman, who herself was grief-stricken over the loss of her beloved father, was forced to submerge her own feelings to look after her selfishly obsessed disconsolate mother. Alice was on duty all day, every day, even sleeping in her mother’s room. Eventually, in July 1862, she was able to escape by marrying Louis of Hesse, another impoverished prince from an obscure German province. The wedding was predictably low key; the Queen wore black, her ladies wore the half-mourning colours of lilac or grey, and only Alice and her bridesmaids were permitted to wear white. Victoria remarked to her daughter Vicky that the ceremony had been more like a funeral than a wedding.6

  With the death of both her mother and her husband, a heavy weight of grief threatened to crush Victoria. She lost weight. Over the years, the Queen’s figure had spread so much that many thought she resembled a barrel; a few kilos less of the Queen would be welcome. More significantly, for over 20 years, Victoria relied on her husband for support and guidance yet now she felt rudderless, a single mother of 42 with nine children. Death rituals in the nineteenth century were elaborate but Victoria took her mourning to a new level. Her bereavement lasted her lifetime: she always wrote on black-edged writing paper and dressed in widow’s weeds.

  And Victoria did what so many people do who have lost loved ones: she got angry and blamed others. The target of Victoria’s wrath was her eldest son, Bertie. Albert had died, Victoria claimed, as a result of that ‘dreadful business’ and the intolerable pain of it all. Bertie had been caught in a sexual relationship with an Irish actress, Nellie Clifden, and the already sickly Albert went to Cambridge to discuss the affair with his son. Shortly after, Albert died – killed, Victoria wilfully decided, by the wickedness of the world that was ‘too much for him to bear’.7 She told her eldest daughter that she could never look at Bertie again ‘without a shudder’.8 And so poor Bertie, who was also grieving for his father, had to shoulder the responsibility for his death. In fact, Bertie had always been a disappointment to his mother. The Queen often complained that her eldest son was so utterly different from Albert, always uneasy that Bertie had adopted the Hanoverian vices of sexual incontinence and hedonism. Victoria, who had hoped to establish a new pure and virtuous dynasty, was appalled by Bertie’s lifestyle and decided to have him married as soon as possible. She was keen not to support a marriage alliance that might be construed as anti-German and only reluctantly agreed to Bertie marrying Princess Alexandra from the impecunious royal house of Denmark. She disliked the end of the ‘German Connection’ whereby British heirs to the throne wed a German relative.9

  Many hoped that the wedding on 10 March 1863 of the heir to the throne would be marked by a grand ceremonial affair at Westminster Abbey. In her grief, Queen Victoria missed a chance to reverse her diminishing popularity by a royal pageant, instead insisting on a small private ceremony in St George’s Chapel at Windsor. The Queen supervised all the arrangements for Bertie’s wedding, even deciding on the dress code. The bride was permitted to wear traditional white and the groom was allowed to wear the colourful scarlet and gold uniform of his regiment. The rest of Victoria’s children were required to wear grey or lilac. Victoria, who watched the wedding ceremony from a balcony, wore her customary black. As soon as she had signed the wedding register, she left the Chapel and went down to the mausoleum to see Albert’s grave. Victoria lamented ‘Oh! What I suffered in the Chapel. . . . I felt as if I should faint. Only by a violent effort, could I succeed in masking my emotion! . . . Sat down feeling strange and bewildered.’ 10 She complained about Bertie, saying ‘Oh! What will become of the poor country when I die! I foresee, if B succeeds, nothing but misery – for he never reflects or listens for a moment and he would . . . spend his life in one whirl of amusements.’11

  When Prince Albert died, Victoria seemed to shut down politically. For the first few months, her ministers and the country forgave her absence, fully aware that the distraught widow might easily be overwhelmed by even the simplest official function. Yet, when the heir to the throne offered to help his mother with her despatch boxes, Victoria rejected his support. The last thing she wanted, Jane Ridley argues, was for Bertie ‘to communicate directly with ministers, undermining her’.12 However, Britain needed a figurehead and the responsibilities and obligations of a sovereign were expected to take precedence over a widow’s feelings. As a bereaved woman, a plain Mrs Wettin,13 she was expected to mourn deeply and privately, wear black and avoid public events; as a queen, the country felt she should abandon these traditions, appear on display, dress like royalty – and behave with commensurate confidence and authority. When the raw pain of grief diminished, Victoria’s mourning entered a deeper level and she grew depressed. She found sleeping difficult, she lacked energy and she felt exhausted and apathetic. For the next decade or so the Queen’s self-indulgent retirement was dubbed the ‘luxury of woe’. She was regarded as a ‘royal malingerer’, squeezing every inch of sympathy from a now dried-up country.

  ‘The mass of people’, wrote a leading politician, ‘expect a King or Queen to look and play the part. They want to see a Crown and a Sceptre and all that sort of thing. They want the gilding for their money. It is not wise to let them think . . . that they could do without a sovereign.’14 Even Bertie warned his mother that if the sovereign was ‘not more seen in London, the loyalty and attachment to the Crown will decrease’.15 However, the Queen, as egocentric as ever, took no notice and decided to spend five months of the year at Balmoral, an estate 600 miles and a 24-hour train journey away from London.

  Unlike elected representatives, Victoria felt entitled to cherry pick the parts of her job she wished to do. Certainly, she seemed more concerned with her rights than her responsibilities. On the one hand, she avoided her responsibility for engaging in public ceremonials such as the opening of parliament or entertaining visiting royalty; on the other hand, she exerted her rights particularly in foreign affairs, and most especially when matters concerned her extended family. If presidents or prime ministers chose to ignore vital elements of their job, then they would be forced to resign, or be voted out by the electorate. But the British people had no such recourse – except to get rid of the monarchy.

  In March 1864, a notice was placed on Buckingham Palace’s railings. It stated that ‘these premises to be let or sold in consequence of the late occupant’s declining business’. At the time, the Queen declined to appear in public; she refused to open parliament and refused to wear the monarch’s official regalia, preferring to dress in black. The Queen, seemingly oblivious to the fact that her seclusion might damage the monarchy, gave in to her inherent shyness, her heartache and her obstinacy, and stayed at home grieving over the death of Prince Albert. Some feared she was deranged, subject to the same mental illness that had affected her grandfather, King George III. This phase of political seclusion – the Queen only opened parliament seven times in this period – meant that a popular republican movement grew apace. Some believed that Victoria sacrificed her duty to Britain to a ‘morbid indulgence in the sorrows of her personal bereavement’.16 The Queen, it was felt, should either abdicate or return to ruling the country. Even the usual pro-monarchy Times had a leader article commenting that ‘it is impossible for a recluse to occupy the British Throne without a gradual weakening of that authority. . . . For the sake of the CROWN . . . we beseech HER MAJESTY to return to the personal exercise of her exalted functions.’17 Victoria complained that the article was vulgar and heartless.

  Victoria’s mourning was soon viewed as pathological, selfish and exceedingly inconsiderate. Time and time again, the Queen used arguments that reflected a conventional femininity rather than a monar
chical authority. She wrote to her ministers grumbling that she ‘was always terribly nervous on all public occasions, but especially at the opening of Parliament. . . . Her nerves are so shattered that any emotion, any discussion, any exertion causes much disturbance and suffering to her whole frame’.18

  Undoubtedly, Victoria’s double identity of Queen and woman conflicted, and her notions of femininity soon came to hinder her position as a monarch. Her private role as grieving widow became more and more antithetical to her public role as Queen, especially when she refused to participate in state ceremonials. Years after Albert’s death, when she was asked to delay her departure to Balmoral to prorogue parliament, she wrote that ‘she had seen from long experience that the more she yielded to pressure and alarm . . . it only encourages further demands . . . It is abominable that a woman and a Queen laden with care and with public and domestic anxieties which are daily increasing should not be able to make people understand that there is a limit to her powers.’ 19 She even resorted to emotional blackmail by threatening that too much work would kill her, as it had Albert. However, many of the British public disapproved of the widening gap between Victoria’s femininity and her role as sovereign; they wanted their queen to be visible and began to object to a weak, vainglorious and feeble woman who would not fulfil her ordained role. Ministers and the country were initially sympathetic to the Queen’s loss but as the Queen’s seclusion set in, many British people lost their patience and anti-monarchical feeling grew.

  The Queen’s popularity was not helped when John Brown, a tall, handsome, strongly built Scot, was brought down to Windsor in order that the Queen could continue to ride and thereby help draw her out of her continuing melancholy. By February 1865 he had become a permanent fixture at court with a new title ‘The Queen’s Highland Servant’ and a new role as the Queen’s personal servant, taking orders only from the Queen and with an ever-increasing salary. Queen Victoria, seemingly attracted by his untamed manliness and uncultured directness, appeared to idolise him and would tolerate no criticism of her beloved servant. To the consternation of the court, the usually protocol-conscious Queen allowed Brown to call her ‘wumman’ and gave him access to her apartments. Indeed, the two slept in adjoining rooms and shared a dram or two of whisky together, all of which suggests a marital-like familiarity rather than a relationship between sovereign and subject. Soon rumours spread that the Queen had married Brown. Jokes were made about Mrs John Brown and the satirical journal Punch printed scurrilously written articles about the alleged relationship. The Queen’s decision to spend even more time at Balmoral – with her beloved John Brown – seemed to confirm the rumours.