The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

After the suspension of the East India Company, Asia itself fell, in effect, under Albert’s benign supervisory fiefdom. ‘All despatches, when received and perused by the Secretary of State to be sent to the Queen,’ the new civil servants were told in 1858.21 ‘We are over-run with visiting royalties, present and prospective,’ Greville complained to his diary in 1857. ‘It is a new feature of the present day, the flitting about of royal personages.’22

  In the marriage of his firstborn – Vicky – to Prince Frederick William (Fritz) of Prussia, there occurred the first of those dynastic alliances by which Albert, had he been spared, might have exercised an influence on a European scale. The marriage took place in the Chapel Royal at St James’s Palace on 25 January 1858. The bride was just seventeen, the bridegroom twenty-six.23 Disraeli, attending the bridal ball at Buckingham Palace, thought there were as many European princes as at the Congress of Vienna – here were the King of the Belgians, the Duke of Brabant, the Count of Flanders, the Prince and Princess Frederick William of Prussia, the Prince and Princess of Prussia, Prince Albert of Prussia, Prince Frederick Charles of Prussia, Prince Frederick Albert of Prussia, Prince Adalbert of Prussia, the Prince of Hohenzollern Sigmaringen, the Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, the Duchess of Orleans, the Comte de Paris, the Duc de Chartres, the Princess of Salerno, the Duke and Duchess d’Aumale, Prince Edward of Saxe-Weimar, the Prince of Leiningen, Prince Victor of Hohenlohe Langenburg and Prince Julius of Holstein Glücksburg.24

  This was Britain ‘at the heart of Europe’ at a period of crucial European change. Prince Albert wanted this dynastic marriage because he saw that the future of Europe was to be shaped by the future of Germany. From his earliest years, under the tutelage of Baron Stockmar, and later as a student of Bonn University, Albert had come to want the unification of Germany.25 Ever since his arrival in England, partly through his friendship with the German ambassador the Baron Bunsen, Albert had formed the view that a strong Anglo-German alliance could influence the direction this unification took. For as long as the German duchies and states were divided, the forces of reaction – in the states themselves, in Russia and in Austria – could go unchecked, save by the dangerous forces of revolution. Albert’s view was that a Germany united by Prussia – but a Prussia which had adopted constitutional government – could be the safest bulwark Europe could have against tyranny on the one hand, anarchy on the other. Many within his own family disagreed with his view – old uncle Leopold, king of the Belgians, was afraid of a ‘Prussian super-nation’ if German unity took place.26 ‘An efficient Germany can come of it, only it would in a kind of way be a Germany subordinated to Prussia.’27 Albert, persuaded partly by Stockmar, partly by his own observation, thought that the little duchies, such as Coburg, were going to be swept aside anyway. The only question was not whether there would be a united Germany, but what kind of nation it would be – a Peelite (as it were) well-balanced Germany, with parliaments and representative government, living at peace with itself and its neighbours and allowing learned men like Baron Bunsen to continue educating the world (Germany’s destiny), or a more tragic, belligerent Germany, economically and politically unstable, falling back on militarism as a poor substitute ‘quick fix’ to achieve national unity.28

  It is possible to disagree with the drift of Albert’s hopes for Europe; it is not possible to be blind to the fact, however, that he was a very well-informed, intelligent and moderate-minded German who knew whereof he spoke. Palmerston, who liked crossing swords with the Prince over European policy, was an old man, a very old man, who never saw that the rise of modern Germany was going to change Europe forever. One sees this in his well-known joke about the Schleswig-Holstein question. Palmerston made the remark when prime minister in 1863 – namely that there were only three people who had ever understood the Schleswig-Holstein question. One was a German professor, and he had gone mad. One was the Prince Consort, and he was dead. The third was himself, and he had forgotten all about it.29 This ‘forgetfulness’ was a handy cloak for diplomatic ineptitude and political-cum-military impotence.

  But if the intricacies of the question were of proverbial complexity, its broad historical implications – in terms of what it meant for the political balance of Europe – were very simple. Throughout the late 1840s and particularly after the revolutions of 1848, Albert was urging Pilgerstein to accept the claims of the overwhelmingly German duchy of Holstein to belong to the German Federation. The position of the predominantly Danish Schleswig was rather different.30 Palmerston’s diplomacy held the pass in 1852, when the London Protocol put both duchies under Danish suzerainty. But ten years later the problems had not gone away. The German-speakers of Holstein wanted to be part of Germany. Bismarck could win popularity at home by invading the duchies – in 1864. ‘God forgive you for it,’ the Queen wrote to Vicky, by then Crown Princess of Prussia. Then – seeing that events would be no different whether God forgave them or not – Victoria urged, ‘only make peace – give the Duchies to good Fritz H[olstein] and have done with it’.31 By the time she wrote this letter Albert was dead, and the Schleswig-Holstein question had become a family row – the Prince of Wales (Bertie) being married to Princess Alexandra of Denmark, and the Princess Royal to the Crown Prince of Prussia. Pilgerstein was prime minister, and he was in the humiliating position of realizing, after the Crimean War, that Britain was militarily powerless against Prussia.

  After the war over the Danish duchies it was left to the Austrians and Prussians to pick over the pieces. Britain had lost any real European influence. For the next thirty years the British could conceal this fact from themselves by greater and greater imperial expansion and concerns with Empire. But it is true, as a modern historian has put it, that by 1864, ‘Britain had ceased, in any real sense, to be a great European power at all.’32 This is the true legacy, not merely of the Crimean War, but of the aristocratic principle, which enabled an old man of Palmerston’s very limited qualities to remain in positions of power for the best part of half a century.

  Would any of it have been different had Prince Albert lived? It is hard to believe his influence would have been absolutely negligible. The Queen’s grief-stricken language about him after he died is so hyperbolic that we are apt to dismiss Albert as a figure of some absurdity, overlooking how enormously he was respected by scientists, diplomats, academics, politicians – and by his own children. The traditional patterns of a ‘Victorian’ family were largely reversed at Osborne and Windsor. It was very much the Queen who was the stern one. Prince Albert once confided in Lord Clarendon that the disagreeable task of punishing the children had always fallen on him, and he regretted not resisting the harshness of the Queen towards her children for fear of exciting her if she were thwarted.33 Lady Lyttelton became superintendent of the Royal Nursery. She was amazed by how severely the children were punished. At four, Princess Alice received ‘a real punishment by whipping’ for telling a lie. The young children were often admonished with their hands tied together, and the Prince of Wales and his brother received even harsher treatment.34 The children did not however seem to respond to Albert either with fear or resentment. At a Royal Academy banquet some years after Albert’s death the Prince of Wales tried to speak of his father and broke down sobbing. After her marriage to Fritz, Vicky wrote – on board HMY Victoria and Albert on the Scheldt – ‘The pain of parting from you yesterday was greater than I can describe; I thought my heart was going to break when you shut the cabin door and were gone – that cruel moment which I had been dreading even to think of for 2 years and a half was past – it was more painful than I had ever pictured it to myself’ – and so on for pages. ‘All your love, etc. I shall most earnestly endeavour to deserve. To you, dear Papa, I owe most in this world.’

  The Princess Royal had comparably intense feelings about her mother. Their frequent correspondence she was to describe as ‘so natural and like thinking aloud’. Certainly these remarkable letters, spanning forty years, give an insight into the Queen’s character and psych
e which is like no other. The candour of Queen Victoria’s dislike of her eldest son, the Prince of Wales, is shocking. ‘Poor Bertie! He vexes us much. There is not a particle of reflection, or even attention to anything but dress! Not the slightest desire to learn, on the contrary, il se bouche les oreilles, the moment anything of interest is being talked of! I only hope he will meet with some severe lesson to shame him out of his ignorance and dullness’ (17 November 1858).35 Bertie ‘is not at all in good looks; his nose and mouth are too enormous and as he pastes his hair down to his head, and wears his clothes frightfully – he really is anything but good looking. That coiffure is really too hideous with his small head and enormous features’ (7 April 1860).36

  Her imperiousness and her attention to detail were, on occasion, provoking. Poor Vicky was given advice by her mother about every conceivable area of life – the temperature to keep her rooms, the desirability of installing water closets not only in her palaces but ‘throughout Germany’,37 as well as every aspect of political life. Sometimes the stream of opinions – the Queen’s dislike of the Anglican Communion Service, her love of the novels of George Eliot, her distaste for babies – might have been entertaining. Sometimes the mother’s need to interfere caused distress, and even fears – expressed by Baron Stockmar when the Queen was in manic or hysterical mode – that she had inherited the malady of her supposed grandfather George III.38 When it came to a stream of bullying letters to the Crown Princess about whether she stood or sat during her son’s christening – ‘Let German ladies do what they like but the English Princess must not’ – Lord Clarendon approached Albert and asked him if he could tell the Queen not to be so interfering. The suggestion put Victoria in ‘a towering passion’.39

  The Queen’s temperament, ever volatile, became actually unhinged on the death of her own mother, the Duchess of Kent, on 16 March 1861. Like many egomaniacs – and was not the whole success of Dr Freud to be based on the universality of the condition? – Queen Victoria had sustained her leap from adolescence to young womanhood by the inner belief that her parent was her enemy. When she became Queen, her rejection of her mother had been total, though with the passing years there had been some rapprochement, not least because her twenty-year marriage to Albert had strengthened her sense of belonging to Coburg. After her mother died, however, the Queen went through the Duchess’s belongings and found the incontrovertible evidence that her mother had always loved her, saving and treasuring every scrap of childhood memorabilia. For a month, Victoria became a morbid solitary, refusing to see her own children, eating her meals alone, and leaving Albert ‘well nigh undone’ with managing the Queen’s business as well as his own. Clarendon said to the Duchess of Manchester, ‘I hope this state of things won’t last, or she may fall into the morbid melancholy to which her mind has always tended and which is a constant cause of anxiety to P[rince] A[lbert].’ So alarming were the reports of the Queen’s melancholy-madness that old Uncle Leopold – the brother of the Duchess of Kent – crossed the Channel to find the court still in full mourning in August.40

  There is no doubt that Albert was weakened by living with the full blast of his wife’s hysteria. As the summer of 1861 wore on he drove himself to work harder and harder, partly, one suspects, because her behaviour had become insufferable. He took her to Ireland to inspect the troops – the Prince of Wales was serving ten weeks in the army there. She complained constantly – of feeling ‘very weak and nervous’. The chief reason for his, and the court’s, insistence that she went was to show her in public, since rumours were now flying all over Europe that she had been incarcerated in a padded cell. They saw Bertie – not deemed real officer material by his seniors in the Grenadiers. His coevals had played him the trick – no doubt very welcome to that young sensualist – of insinuating Nellie Clifden, a young ‘actress’, into his bed.

  By the autumn, rumours of this silly escapade had reached the London clubs and the royal family was looking more than usually absurd. On 24 November, in drenching rain – entsetzlicher Regen – and with a heavy head cold, Albert inspected the troops at Sandhurst. The next day he went to Cambridge, where Bertie was supposedly a student, to upbraid him, and there followed a painful reconciliation between father and son. The general feeling of overwork and of being ‘run down’ had turned into something more serious. For some time Albert had been depressed, and suffered from stomach pains, toothache and exhaustion.

  Something had died in him. Ich hange gar nicht am Leben; du hängst sehr daran … he had said to the Queen when he was at a low ebb – ‘I do not cling to life; you do; but I set no store by it. I am sure that if I had a severe illness I should give up at once; I should not struggle for life. I have no tenacity for life.’41

  A very strange moment had occurred about a year before when Albert and Victoria visited Coburg. Riding alone in a carriage drawn by four horses, which suddenly took fright, Albert found himself being taken rapidly towards a railway crossing. He tried to take control of the horses, which crashed towards a wagon on the road. Albert leapt free, and he rushed at once to the aid of the coachman whose wagon was wrecked. One of his horses was killed. During this accident – and he was only forty when it happened – he sensed that ‘my last hour had come’ – mein letztes Stündlein gekommen wäre.42

  By the beginning of December 1861, it was clear that the Prince Consort was gravely ill: the likeliest explanation for this is that he had succumbed to typhoid fever. (Back in November 1858, the Queen had been complaining to Vicky that ‘that horrid fever’ was sweeping through Windsor; he who had done so much to encourage Edwin Chadwick’s campaign for proper sanitation might well have died because of the drains at Windsor Castle; or, some say, it was cancer.) When Princess Alice told him on 7 December that she’d written to Vicky to say he was ill he replied, ‘You did wrong. You should have told her I am dying.’43

  The doctors, as so often, were worse than useless, but perhaps it was a hopeless case. On 14 December, the Queen knelt by his bed and said Es ist kleines Fraüchen (It is your little wife). He signalled his consent when she offered him ein Kuss, but he was slipping away into the only condition which guaranteed a respite from her moods, tantrums and noise.

  As the Princess Royal knew from her mother’s letters on the subject, Queen Victoria was insistent on the installation of ‘very necessary conveniences’ near the bedrooms in royal residences … ‘A real blessing’.44 Such was her need to avail herself of this modern provision that it was left to the ladies in waiting, the equerries and the Prince Consort’s children to witness his actual demise.

  By the time she returned, she exclaimed, ‘Oh, this is death, I know it. I have seen this before’ … ‘I took his dear left hand which was already cold and knelt down by him. All, all was over.’

  When she withdrew to the Red Room the equerries and her children, all ‘deeply affected but quiet’, gathered round her. She clutched the hand of Prince Arthur’s governor, Sir Howard Elphinstone, and pleaded, ‘You will not desert me? You will all help me.’45

  In an instant, everything had changed, not merely in the Queen’s life, and in that of the court and the royal family, but in England and Europe generally. Put bluntly, there was no longer an intelligent member of the royal family. British constitutional monarchy had been a very limited power, but now there was no serious check on the oligarchy of politicians who could flatter, cajole or sidestep the royal ego entirely. Whereas, in Albert’s day, an intelligent influence was brought to bear, as it were, downwards from the throne, on social questions in particular but to a smaller degree on foreign policy, the relationship between politicians and the Crown now became merely a camp joke. Over the next half-century, the progeny of Victoria and Albert would marry and be given in marriage to all the important royal houses of Europe except the Austrian. Within seventy years of Albert’s death nearly all these dynasties would be swept away – in Russia, Prussia, Austria, Spain and the Balkans. The fact that the monarchy survived in England was not a token of its stren
gth but of its triviality. Had Albert lived, Britain, too, might have paid its monarchy the compliment of wishing to check, or even to abolish, its influence. As it was, the Widow of Windsor, living as a virtual recluse for years and performing almost no constitutional function, helped to lead the monarchy into a position where it was not worth abolishing. The claim that Britain was a monarchy in any but the most titular sense was now a fantasy.

  fn1 In those days, Down.

  PART III

  The Eighteen-Sixties

  17

  The Beloved – Uncle Tom – and Governor Eyre

  THE LITTLE BOY holding up a small golden bucket of roses in Rossetti’s canvas The Beloved wears a doleful expression, not altogether suitable for this supposed celebration of connubial bliss. The melancholy of the child, whose name is not remembered, is understandable when we know that he was suffering from a cold. Rossetti had spotted him on the steps of a London hotel and realized that he would make an exotic adjunct to this work, which had been commissioned as a Christmas present for the wife of a wealthy Birkenhead banker called Rae. The child, a black boy, was a slave, travelling with his American master. Finding himself whisked off to Rossetti’s studio in Chelsea, the boy had wept copiously, an object of fascination to the painter, who noticed that the moisture on his cheeks made his dark skin even darker. While Dante Gabriel Rossetti patiently sketched and painted, the destiny of the boy’s fellow African-Americans was being forged in the bloodiest war of the century. While the child wept, and Rossetti begged him to keep still, Sherman’s army was advancing through Georgia to Atlanta, burning and pillaging, while in an opposite direction on ox-drawn carts and makeshift wagons black refugees fled from slavery, some to a new life which was an improvement on the old, many or most to poverty and ill-treatment every bit as horrible as their lives under the old dispensation.