Queen Victoria

by Matthew Dennison

  From its first clandestine flickerings, when, in September 1855, Fritz acknowledged to her parents that he was in love with the fourteen-year-old Vicky, it was an engagement that provoked a bittersweet response in Victoria. Her sense of Vicky’s extreme youth augmented what would become her standard reaction to the idea of girls’ marriage: an overwhelming aversion, despite the happiness of her own conjugal relations, to the coming union’s sexual implications (‘I said to Papa … “after all, it is like taking a poor lamb to be sacrificed”’7). Credits to balance so unsettling a debit included Victoria’s personal fondness for Fritz, the thrill this essentially romantic woman derived from her daughter’s evident adoration of her handsome prince, and her pride in Albert’s plans for Continental constitutionalism. It was also a connection of suitable éclat, though Victoria was clear that it was her own family which added lustre to the bargain. ‘Whatever may be the usual practice of Prussian Princes, it is not every day that one marries the eldest daughter of the Queen of England,’ she thundered over inevitable pre-wedding glitches. It was an assertion that did not invite correction.

  Victoria was in a state of unsettlement. Sir James Clark, who remained her physician despite the fiasco of the Flora Hastings Affair and any number of subsequent misdiagnoses, had insisted that her latest baby, Beatrice, be her last. Clark shared Albert’s mistaken fear that Victoria’s predisposition to postnatal depression presaged mental illness of the sort that had so dramatically incapacitated her grandfather George III. In addition, intimations of mortality began their surefooted approach. On 10 December 1857, Victoire, Duchesse de Nemours, a first cousin of both Victoria and Albert through her father Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg, died in childbirth, the second of Victoria’s cousins to die in the same house of the same cause. She was thirty-five years old, beautiful, quiet and unobtrusive. A daughter-in-law of the exiled King Louis Philippe of France, she had lived at Claremont and enjoyed an easy intimacy with the British royal couple: Victoria described her as ‘like a dear sister to us’. Certainly the cousins’ closeness was such that Victoria and Albert viewed her body after death. Startlingly Albert recorded his impressions. She was ‘pale and rigid, but like an angel of beauty, her glorious hair falling in waves over her bosom’, a response evocative of its time.8 In its unflinching focus and apparent sensuousness, Albert’s description foreshadows that preoccupation with death and its mysteries which would all too soon envelop Victoria’s life.

  On 6 December 1839, Albert had outlined in a letter the very mixed emotions he felt on contemplating his final departure from Coburg to marry Victoria. The recipient of that letter was Victoria’s mother.

  The Duchess of Kent was Albert’s paternal aunt, called by him ‘Aunt Kent’, like him a Coburger in England. They had met in 1836 and again in 1839. Despite the breakdown in Victoria’s own relationship with her mother, Albert’s letter was open and familiar. ‘I am lost in bewilderment,’ he told his aunt, an invitation for complicity. At the outset, the Duchess apparently had reason to resent her nephew: his marriage to Victoria provided the latter with the excuse she craved for removing her mother from Buckingham Palace. Yet the arrival of Albert was to spell the beginning of a rapprochement between the two women. Victoria herself had done nothing to achieve this: the Duchess at least had previously asked advice of the Duke of Wellington on a possible solution to so acrimonious an impasse.

  Albert may have been guided by fondness for his aunt, her tendency to behave in a manner that was foolish, vain, conniving and meddlesome notwithstanding. His behaviour betrayed that family feeling which was embedded in the Coburg psyche, the same feeling which later shaped his attitude to his children and, in time, helped inspire Victoria’s spiderweb orchestration of a Europe-wide matriarchy. His motives also included expediency. Albert sought and identified the cause of Victoria’s continuing enmity towards her mother. By happy chance he found it in his own bête noire, Baroness Lehzen. Albert had not long been married to Victoria before he managed Lehzen’s low-key dismissal. He was certain that the retirement of this gossiping and over-ambitious ex-governess, so essential to his own happiness, would increase Victoria’s happiness too by eliminating the principal remaining agent of discord between mother and daughter.

  And so it proved to be, though Victoria, in many ways free from guile, was adept at nurturing dislike and slow to exonerate those who had angered her. In this instance she appeared unable fully to grasp the extent and nature of the Duchess’s love for her, but dutifully made available to her mother Clarence House in London and Frogmore Lodge, Windsor, both of which had stood empty since the death of her aunt, Princess Augusta, in September 1840. The process of relocation was successful: separation did indeed make the heart grow fonder in Victoria’s case. The way was cleared for the Duchess’s metamorphosis into much-loved grandmother. As a portrait sketch of 1851 by Henry Courtney Selous and Winterhalter’s oval portrait of 1857 make clear, the older woman was in nowise changed: the compressed lips and unflinching gaze of both images testify to steadiness of purpose and a firmness to match her daughter’s.

  The Duchess’s diary for 18 June 1857 recorded the experience of sitting for Winterhalter for the last time: ‘It is a great penitence for me to sit for my picture, but it is for Victoria. It made me very tired.’9 The Duchess was seventy-one and her energies fading; Victoria commended only her mother’s youthfulness of spirit, which she summoned for the sake of her grandchildren. Lady-in-waiting Lady Augusta Bruce, observing the Duchess at close quarters, chronicled her decline less evasively. ‘It goes to one’s heart to see one symptom after another and increasing discomfort and inconvenience,’ she wrote on 15 January 1861.10 Her death on 16 March, a week after an operation on her arm, did not greatly surprise. But its effect on Victoria was elemental. Initial physical collapse gave way to a nervous breakdown so overwhelming that rumours of her insanity swept the chancelleries of Europe; in Prussia Vicky could not escape the clamour of septic whispers. Victoria was crushed by grief. Guilt played its part, impossible that it should not. Remorse too. Her journal offered agonising reading. ‘I don’t believe Ma. ever really loved me,’ she had written, reporting a conversation with Melbourne.11 She must once have believed it, and perhaps subsequently too. To tears for her mother were added tears for herself, for her misapprehension, the misconstructions, the injustice of her angry folly; tears for what had vanished never to be recalled; tears for what might have been; tears for the happy times; tears on top of tears. ‘The relief of tears is great,’ she wrote to Vicky on 10 April, ‘they come again and again every day and are soothing to the bruised heart and soul.’12 Although Victoria fled the jarring company of her family in order to find solace in solitude and silence, her tears would not soon be dried. Ominously she insisted three days later, ‘I love to dwell on her … and not to be roused out of my grief!’13 Later she claimed that ‘the power of enjoyment of any thing seems (for the time) entirely gone!’14 In truth she had discovered an alternative enjoyment, this only child of forty-one who, remarkably in the middle years of the nineteenth century, had never previously encountered the reality of death so nearly.

  It was a foretaste of things to come.

  Vicky soon fell pregnant. To the latter’s irritation, her mother was unable to be present at the birth. Instead Victoria and Albert visited their married daughter months before the great event. For both, there were already indications that Vicky would fail in her ‘civilising’ mission to Prussia: ‘I always feel like a fly struggling in a very tangled web, and a feeling of weariness and depression, often of disgust and hopelessness, takes possession of me,’ Vicky lamented.15 Her parents ignored the signs. In her journal Victoria recorded details of a more picturesque variety. The customs of Prussian mourning struck her forcibly, the habit of preserving undisturbed souvenirs of the departed: the chair in which Frederick the Great had died darkened still with bloody stains.16 At home she revisited ‘unhappy Claremont’ a year after Victoire’s death. In a handsome display case she saw her cous
in’s hair – preserved under glass in all its serpentine lustrousness. The finality of death seemed simultaneously to be celebrated and denied. For Victoria, deep in her subconscious, a picture was forming.

  Albert’s death on 14 December 1861, though he was only forty-two, ought to have been no more surprising than that of the Duchess of Kent, but Victoria was skilful in resisting the unpalatable. Freely she acknowledged her husband’s physical exhaustion, his sleeplessness too and the all-encompassing depression which further sapped his energies (it also sapped his will to live, though Victoria did not care to dwell on his more fatalistic utterances). Since she knew only too well that she could not survive without him, she refused to countenance that possibility. The irredeemably unreliable Clark, at seventy-three still forceful in his ineptitude, appeared to bolster her breezy attitude: he refused the assistance of colleagues and lulled the willing Victoria into a state of denial which surprised some onlookers. A grim sort of comedy is injected into Housman’s Death and the Doctors by Clark’s equivocation. Albert, he allows, is ill: ‘dangerously’ ill – the qualification suggested by a solicitous Princess Alice as a means of preparing Victoria for every eventuality – is a description too frightening for Clark to permit. And so the prince dies, killed by highhandedness in the matter of adverbs.

  To Vicky, on 27 November 1861, Victoria claimed that Albert was suffering from ‘a cold with neuralgia’. This was exacerbated, she explained, by ‘loss of rest at night (worse than he has ever had before) … caused by a great sorrow and worry’.17 The sorrow in question arose from the deaths from typhoid fever early in the month of twenty-three-year-old King Pedro V of Portugal, eulogised by Victoria as ‘out and out the most distinguished young Prince there is … good, excellent and steady, according to one’s heart’s desire’,18 and his brother Prince Ferdinand; both were the sons of a Coburg cousin, and Victoria likened Albert’s love for Pedro to that of a father. The source of the worry was Albert’s own son, Bertie. In medical terms, neither could be categorised as a cause of death, although the egregious Clark would make just that connection, afterwards citing Bertie’s love affair as a nail in Albert’s coffin.19 Both he and his successor William Jenner also pinpointed Albert’s excessive workload. Jenner’s assessment that it was ‘great worry, and far too hard work for too long’ was one Victoria would afterwards exploit to the full. 20

  In 1849, the Prussian sculptor Emil Wolff had completed a second version of a statue of Albert dressed in the garb of a Greek warrior.21 Although Victoria had commended the first version as ‘very beautiful’, Albert recoiled from the exposure of his marble limbs, barefoot and wearing the shortest of filmy ‘kilts’ beneath his breastplate. He regarded it as ‘too undressed’. He commissioned a revised study, which was afterwards displayed at Buckingham Palace in company with a similarly Greek representation of Victoria. In Wolff’s second statue, Albert wears sandals. His kilt too is demonstrably longer. Propriety had been restored and modesty defended; so painstakingly was eroticism banished. It was indicative of the need for unwavering vigilance: ironic indeed had Albert’s own portraiture celebrated fleshly indulgence.

  But it is easier to modify the appearance of a work of art than the inclinations of a young man of easygoing bonhomie exposed to the full panoply of worldly temptations. Only the highest expectations had ever been cherished for the Prince of Wales. For Albert, his eldest son must become a model prince, living proof of the thoroughness of Albert’s own cleansing of the Augean Stable that was England’s Hanoverian court; to that end, from earliest infancy Bertie had been ‘entrusted to persons only who [were] themselves morally good, intelligent, well-informed and experienced’.22 For Victoria he must emulate in every way the perfect and angelic father whose name he shared. ‘I wish that he should grow up entirely under his Father’s eye, and every step be guided by him, so that when he has attained the age of 16 or 17 he may be a real companion to his Father,’ Victoria stated when Bertie was three.23 Neither parent took much account of Bertie’s own nature. He was a cipher, a blank tablet on which their palpably good intentions could be deeply graven. Predictably he proved a disappointment to them both.

  His fall, when it happened, involved a young woman of pert allure and elastic morals called Nellie Clifden. An unremarkable example of wild oats, it provoked in Albert – this man whose punctiliousness extended even to the undress of a statue – an overreaction of hysterical proportions, as if like a comet’s tail Bertie’s casual transgression summoned from some shady underworld all the indiscriminate lasciviousness of recent royal history. His mercy dash to Cambridge to rescue the twenty-year-old heir to the throne tired and weakened a man already sickening. Only days earlier, Albert had visited the new Staff College at Sandhurst on a morning of persistent rain. In Cambridge, father and son were reconciled during a lengthy walk also conducted in intermittent biting rain.

  Albert had complained of rheumatism, of aching limbs which sharpened his tiredness. He was always cold. When, before first light, he began his self-appointed task of never-ending paperwork, he resorted to a wig to warm that bald patch which contributed to his prematurely aged appearance. The robust and bustling Victoria was torn between irritation and a desperate sort of sympathy, anxious that Albert had simply given up. At intervals he had told her as much. ‘He had suddenly grown weary in the middle of his days … he was tired, though it was still noonday and life seemed yet to stretch far before him.’24

  More than 150 years after the event, the two-week countdown to Albert’s death retains an unreal quality, as if the players in this drama are each reading from separate scripts, wilful in their adherence to the certainty of conflicting outcomes. On 30 November, and 4, 6, 10 and 11 December, Victoria wrote to Vicky to reassure her daughter that Albert’s condition was improving; on 2 and 7 December, her letters indicated ‘a sort of feverish attack’. Only on 13 December, did Fritz receive a telegram instructing him to prepare his pregnant wife for worse news, by then less than a day away.

  The royal doctors misled Victoria, incompetence to agree an effective course of treatment compounded by their desire to avoid, at all costs, a second collapse of the sort she had endured following the death of the Duchess; ‘no cause for alarm’, Clark asserted, must be their mantra if Victoria were not to buckle under the strain.25 Torn between her determination to believe them and the daily evidence of Albert’s lassitude and listlessness, his loss of appetite and inability to rally strength, Victoria oscillated between prostration and a tremulous conviction of imminent recovery. Her need for Albert remained overwhelming: it demanded the empty nourishment contained in the doctors’ evasive diagnosis of ‘gastric fever’. But her terror never left her, all too clear to that grown-up daughter, Alice, who at this moment of crisis acted as nurse to both parents. Sometimes Victoria’s fears expressed themselves in exasperation. Albert in return behaved unpredictably towards his wife, repeatedly irascible; there were interludes of tenderness. At her father’s request, Alice played hymns: ‘To Thee, O Lord, I yield my spirit/ Who break’st, in love, this mortal chain;/ My life I but from Thee inherit,/ And death becomes my chiefest gain.’26 It was not a happy choice. By a tremendous effort, he had undertaken one final piece of work on his wife’s behalf, modifying the stridency of an ultimatum which the government meant to deliver to their American counterparts. America was embroiled in civil war: without Albert’s intervention in the matter of the illegal boarding of a British ship, Britain too might have found herself party to that conflagration. Handing over the draft, Albert told Victoria, ‘I am so weak, I have hardly been able to hold the pen’, words without exaggeration. Husband and wife were locked in a spiral of sleeplessness from which only one would emerge.

  Belatedly bulletins alerted the public to Albert’s ill health. They avoided the only issue that mattered, a truthful assessment of the likelihood or otherwise of the prince’s recovery from typhoid fever. On the final day, only three days after Victoria had written to Vicky, ‘I can, I am thankful to say, report a
nother good night … The doctors are satisfied … he is not weaker,’27 Albert’s black and swollen tongue struggled to form even the names of those he loved. At the end there were no parting words for the wife who hung on his every word, no intimacy in a room crowded with relatives and retainers, save Victoria’s unremitting focus on the man she loved with desperate urgency. She held his hand in hers, though it was already cold. She would not let go.

  7

  ‘Unavailing regrets’

  THE TIMES WAS quite mistaken when, in the aftermath of Albert’s death, it asserted as a certainty: ‘We have on the throne a Sovereign whose nerves have been braced rather than paralysed by the chill of adversity.’1 If only Victoria could have responded to that hearty profession, as she would later (albeit anonymously) respond to such assertions on the newspapers’ parts, she might have indicated with some vigour how inadequate was its description of her suffering. In virtual seclusion at Osborne, attended by her daughter Alice, heedless of the passing days, of Christmas which came and went without joyful intermission, she concerned herself with thoughts of Albert, ‘of his great goodness and purity, quite unlike anyone else’, her existence ‘as if living in a dreadful dream’, ‘like life in death’,2 those thoughts, as Albert had once warned Vicky, ‘much in the past’ and guided by ‘a spiritual necessity to cling to moments that are flown and to recollections’: alone in a grieving nation unmoved by those many tributes of the press which belatedly acknowledged Albert’s worth. (It was not until 21 January that Victoria’s journal indicates she was aware of the nature of public reaction to the death. At that point her thoughts were as much of herself as of Albert: ‘Even the poor people in small villages, who don’t know me, are shedding tears for me …’3) A nearer and more straightforward assessment than that of The Times is contained in the letter Victoria wrote to King William of Prussia on 4 February: ‘For me, life came to an end on December 14.’4