For almost a century writers, and readers, have treated Victoria with something less than reverence. The arch insinuations of Lytton Strachey’s Queen Victoria, published in 1921, suggest selfishness and humbug. Strachey quotes Victoria only to tease her as he drags her from her pedestal; he will not allow her sincerity. In Strachey’s hands, Victoria’s written utterances embody the vices of a generation and a culture. Her lavish underlinings, the exclamation marks she haemorrhages with such emphatic abandon and her perpetually bleeding heart, all goad him to quiet but deadly laughter – oh, the earnestness, the egotism and the vehemence of those Victorians! Post Strachey, readers encounter Victoria ironically; such irony targets the frequently exaggerated idiom in which Victoria expressed herself, never more so than after Albert’s death. But in doing so it strips her writing of its power and denies the possibility of her pain. After Albert’s death, Victoria did indeed appear to revel in the unfolding narrative of her misery, she herself its foremost chronicler. It ought not to be grounds for surprise.
As long ago as 1839, threatened with the defeat of Melbourne’s government, she had exclaimed, ‘The state of agony, grief and despair into which this placed me may be easier imagined than described! All all my happiness gone! That happy peaceful life destroyed.’5 Now she gave way to a degree of self-absorption remarkable in so public a figure – and adversely impressive. Yet the immensity of her initial unhappiness is beyond question. Her need to proclaim her grief in writing – the medium which, through her journal and her correspondence, had served as her principal resource for self-expression since the unhappy Kensington years – was also a means of bringing order to chaos and legitimising those extraordinarily powerful emotions which otherwise threatened to fell her. ‘I don’t know what I feel,’ she wrote to Vicky on 16 December, in a note of affecting incoherence.6 In letters, her journal and a small notebook, Remarks – Conversations – Reflections, she eventually came closer to an answer.
Her reactions on 14 December included dignified acquiescence, as she accepted the condolences and offers of support of her family and her household in the minutes immediately following Albert’s death; and the indignity of that agony she could not suppress: she shrieked; like a wounded animal she cried out; attended by a lady-in-waiting she threw herself with open arms on top of Albert’s corpse, convulsed with weeping; briefly she lost the use of her legs. Throughout their marriage, Albert had attempted to guide Victoria away from that inclination to excess which he regarded as her family’s most dangerous failing. After his death it was the loss of his ‘guidance’ she lamented most: her reaction was magisterial in its excess. She ordered so much black crepe to drape the rooms and corridors of Windsor Castle that the entire country’s store was exhausted: more had to be dyed at speed.7 She decreed official mourning ‘for the longest term in modern times’8 and barricaded herself in black bombazine: she would wear widow’s weeds until the day she died, setting aside into the bargain much of that jewellery designed especially for her by Albert. Her world was hedged in by the thick black margins of that sable-bordered writing paper on which she composed and recomposed the litany of her sorrow, effecting for herself and generations of unintended readers her transformation from Queen of Hearts to Queen of Tears. From the ashes of the pyre emerged the Widow of Windsor.
Occasionally her behaviour bordered on the ludicrous: Privy Council meetings at Osborne, where Victoria sat in an adjoining room, the door ajar, listening but unseen. She observed from vantage points of semi-concealment the marriages of Alice and Bertie – the former to Prince Louis of Hesse in July 1862, the latter, in March of the following year, to Princess Alexandra of Denmark, called Alix, acclaimed by Victoria somewhat vaguely as ‘a pearl’ and ‘a dear lovely being’ despite her family’s history of immorality, but later deplored for being insufficiently ‘grande dame’.9 Both matches had been agreed by Albert, who was occupied with the redesign of Bertie and Alix’s London house right up until his death. At Alice’s wedding in the private apartments at Osborne, Victoria was shielded from onlookers by a human screen formed by her sons, including Alfred, who sobbed conspicuously throughout the ceremony. Above the improvised altar hung Winterhalter’s great group portrait, The Royal Family in 1846, asserting Albert’s presence in spirit and conjuring an alternative Victoria, a figure both maternal and majestic, a contrast which can only have stimulated the curiosity of those present. Afterwards Victoria described the event unapologetically as ‘more like a funeral’ than a wedding. These tepid festivities represented a poor return for Alice’s unfailing sympathy, her nursing and the numerous recent occasions when she had acted as go-between for Victoria and the government ministers she refused to encounter at first hand.
At Bertie’s wedding in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, Victoria retreated to Catherine of Aragon’s closet high above the chancel in the chapel’s southeast corner. The combination of the balcony’s gold-embroidered velvet draperies and those diamonds which dazzled against Victoria’s black weeds did little to render her unobtrusive. (In Frith’s painting of the service, it is noticeable that many eyes stray towards Victoria.) Yet this was unintentional on her part. Genuinely she shrank from view. She likened herself to ‘a poor hunted hare’.10 To the unsympathetic it looked like flummery. In her misery she failed to muster many good wishes for Bertie and Alix’s happiness, reminded too powerfully of her own vanished joy; instead she concentrated with rapt attention on the less challenging spectacle of her youngest daughter, Albert’s last favourite, the five-year-old Beatrice: ‘I could not take my eyes off precious little Baby, with her golden hair and large nosegay.’ It was self-indulgent … it was dampening.
Perhaps she consoled herself that the nation approved her behaviour, as in the aftermath of her mother’s death: ‘The general sympathy for me, and approval of the manner in which I have shown my grief, is quite wonderful and most touching.’11 Almost certainly she was too deeply sunk in wretchedness to care. It does not appear to have occurred to her that the nation’s sympathy would prove exhaustible. After its first mistaken assessment, The Times granted Victoria a two-year reprieve, before signalling that the time for change was nigh: ‘Two years it must be said are a long period to be consumed in unavailing regrets and in dwelling upon days which cannot be healed.’12 Ever wilful, headstrong to her own detriment and hardwired to resist every form of coercion, Victoria showed no sign of altering her course. Repeatedly The Times returned to the fray. From Belgium, Leopold stressed to her the connection between showing herself in public and popular affection. On 26 March 1864, The Saturday Review explained, ‘Seclusion is one of the few luxuries in which Royal personages may not indulge. The power which is derived from affection or from loyalty needs a life of uninterrupted publicity to sustain it.’13 Nothing availed. In her husband’s memory, on 10 February 1862, the twenty-second anniversary of her wedding, Victoria had instituted a new family order, the Order of Victoria and Albert. The badge consisted of a cameo depicting the heads of husband and wife, Victoria’s uppermost, Albert’s glimpsed beneath it. When Victoria commissioned the cameo that she herself was to wear, the order of the heads was reversed. It was Albert’s which was uppermost, Victoria scarcely visible beneath his classical profile, all but obliterated, a wish made concrete.14 Talisman-like, Victoria wore the order for the first time at Bertie’s wedding. It was obvious what occupied her thoughts.
The public expression of Victoria’s widowhood was a contrivance (in private she complained to Vicky, ‘I never, never shall be able to bear that dreadful weary, chilling, unnatural life of a widow’15). As careful a construct as any of her previous public masquerades, it subsumed Victoria’s sovereignty within a domestic role more safely aligned to current sexual politics. In this way alone Victoria clearly acted as Albert’s disciple after his death. With more than her usual emphasis, she shared with Leopold her one ‘firm resolve’: ‘that his wishes – his plans – about every thing are to be my law! And no human power will make me swerve from what he decided a
nd wished.’16 With that rhetoric of wifely loyalty she kept faith through the next four decades. And yet, as we will see, in invoking Albert’s wishes and example, she frequently acted in a manner profoundly ‘unAlbertine’. For this daughter of late-Georgian England could not escape her heredity entirely. She was greedy and selfish, albeit the appetites slaked were vanity and pride rather than lust, her extravagance unchecked emotionalism in place of overspending. On 12 October 1863, The Times labelled Victoria’s grief ‘a sort of religion’. In truth it encompassed none of the restraints of conventional religious practice, nearer to the intemperance of a fetish. Victoria’s reinvention of herself as tragic heroine perpetuated a distorted, perfected version of Albert’s memory. It was an act of piety that, in the short term, was fully comprehensible to many of her contemporaries, with their exuberant mourning and avidity concerning the afterlife. By 1864, dissent was vocal and widespread. Exasperation at Victoria’s continuing seclusion undermined her panegyric of ‘Albert the Good’. Posterity has inclined to scepticism. The Biblical quotation inscribed in the Albert Memorial Chapel in St George’s Chapel, Windsor – ‘I have fought the good fight, I have finished my course’ – suggests, as Victoria intended, an earthly saint. Smugness too and the chill of perfection.
The broken-hearted Victoria sought solace in a frenzy of artistic patronage. Monuments and memorials to Albert, and the rapid-fire development of a brand new iconography for herself, arose from the same impulse: the need to sanction her grief through consensus concerning Albert’s greatness. Over and over Victoria was painted and photographed gazing adoringly at images of Albert; even when the deceased paterfamilias was not visibly represented, Victoria’s inky garb or the sorrowing figures of his fatherless children summoned his blameless shade. Significantly, the critic in the London Review expressed discomfort at the intimacy of images like William Bambridge’s photograph, Mourning the Prince Consort, of 1862, in which Victoria and three of her children are posed in attitudes of emotional collapse beside a garlanded bust of the prince; the same critic also hinted with distaste at the degree of theatricality implicit in such artfully contrived tableaux.17 Such potent public expressions of Victoria’s sadness smacked of ostentation. Her detractors recoiled from the apparent relish of her gloom, the orgiastic quality of her suffering.
The dual monarchy of Victoria and Albert had concealed behind closed doors the ‘masculine’ aspects of Victoria’s sovereignty. Instead it publicised her ‘hidden’, private role as wife and mother. So in the first years of her bereavement, Victoria celebrated this new ‘private’ role of widow. The wheel had turned full circle: she was again the small child of William Beechey’s double portrait, clasping a miniature of her father, herself a pendant to that vanished male. Albert’s image by Ross, commissioned in the fervour of her engagement and set in brilliants, served no longer as a badge of possession of all that she had won, but of what was lost. Four decades on, Victoria described herself as ‘like a child that has lost its mother’; the Duchess of Atholl described her in her widow’s cap as ‘look[ing] like a child’.18 In terms of Victoria the queen, Albert was indeed her progenitor. Observers had noted those occasions when, ventriloquist-like, he instructed Victoria what questions to ask politicians and officials, whispering to her in German at banquets; Victoria then repeated Albert’s questions in English. Such puppetry could hardly be made public. While Victoria actively promoted her widowhood, even resorting to being photographed with a spinning wheel in the guise of cottager’s relict, roleplay infinitely remote from the political arena she could not escape, she broadcast to a narrower circle and with a degree of circumspection her terror of reigning alone.
Yet terror it was. Albert had insisted that the Crown assert its prerogatives, and had done so on Victoria’s behalf. There were solid grounds for Disraeli’s claim that he had ‘governed England for twenty-one years with a wisdom and energy such as none of our kings have ever shown’. At his death, Victoria’s energy found an alternative outlet; at this stage she lacked the requisite wisdom. She was helpless, like an invalid whose limbs have atrophied from lack of use: suddenly she had to walk unaided.
She begged for assistance: ‘It is very difficult for the Queen, when she is left without one word of explanation to assist her, to draw her own conclusions from the perusal of voluminous despatches from abroad …, when she receives drafts for her approval, and to judge, in her ignorance of her views of the Government, or of the reasons which have dictated them, whether she should approve them or not.’19 For she was trapped in a dilemma, longing to exist alone and undisturbed with her grief, determined not to be sidelined by those who sought to downgrade the sovereign’s part. As early as 14 January 1862, Victoria reminded the Foreign Secretary of her rights: ‘Lord Russell will perhaps take care that the rule should not be departed from, viz that no drafts should be sent without the Queen’s having first seen them’;20 the following year she repeated to Palmerston ‘her desire that no step is taken in foreign affairs without her previous sanction being obtained’.21 Before her letter to Russell, she had claimed that she felt ‘daily more and more worn and wretched’: at the same time she retained the instinct for command. It was the sort of contradiction Victoria regularly embraced. Lady Augusta Bruce, formerly the Duchess of Kent’s lady-in-waiting, now a woman of the bedchamber to Victoria, highlighted ‘the necessity for Her to act with decision and firmness and the dread lest this should make Her close Her ears to such advice as may yet be offered, but which now no one is in a position to offer’.22 For the remainder of her long reign, the question of who was in a position to offer advice would exercise not only Victoria but those who felt themselves entrusted with, or entitled to, such a role.
Four days after Albert’s death, Victoria wrote to Vicky that she had chosen ‘a spot in Frogmore Gardens for a mausoleum for us’;23 a week later she had canvassed her preferred artists for assistance. By the end of the month, Marochetti the sculptor had embarked on the modelling of the head of his tomb effigy of Albert. The building’s foundations were begun and, with something like enthusiasm, Victoria anticipated laying the first stone herself in March.
It was a project on which she would lavish considerable attention. The work was costly and time-consuming. Albert’s remains were not finally formally interred until 1868, a year after publication of another of Victoria’s memorials to her husband, The Early Years of HRH The Prince Consort, in which she offered nominal author, equerry Charles Grey, extensive ‘assistance’. That lengthy timespan stands as a metaphor for Victoria’s state of mind: her reluctance to bury the past and embrace her altered present. In the meantime, she retreated regularly to the mausoleum to pray. With evident sincerity she anticipated her own life ending soon after that of her husband and commissioned from Marochetti a partner effigy for her own tomb. (In fact she survived her husband by so long that Marochetti’s effigy was temporarily lost at the time of Victoria’s death.) Throughout its evolution, the mausoleum absorbed her thoughts apparently more conspicuously than topics more generally considered within the sovereign’s remit.
Such an assessment, which gained adherents throughout the 1860s, told only part of the story, however. Victoria had seldom felt strongly about the finer points of domestic policy, although she was vigorous in defence of her constitutional rights in this as in all aspects of the working of government carried out in her name; over time she developed a lively interest in ecclesiastical appointments. Like Albert, she took a particular and personal interest in foreign policy; the first years of her widowhood were overshadowed by the warring claims of the Prussian and Danish crowns and the Duke of Augustenburg to the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. Although Albert had an eye for policy and an instinct for how best to advance the Crown’s cause, Victoria, less sure of herself politically, was conscientious in the matter of paperwork. At her desk at Windsor, Osborne and Balmoral, she kept pace with the documentation of public life. It was not an undertaking from which she derived any satisfaction. To Leopold she
described the impact of her work: ‘constant anxiety, responsibility, and interruptions of every kind, where at every turn the heart is crushed and the wound is probed!’24 This being the case, she could not understand any suggestion that the fulfilment of this clerical aspect of her position was not in itself enough. It was the bread and circuses of monarchy she shunned; it was for bread and circuses that the people increasingly bayed. In 1864, a notice outside Buckingham Palace announced: ‘These commanding premises to be let or sold in consequence of the late occupant’s declining business.’ Something serious underpinned the ribaldry. Waspishly, author and journalist Margaret Oliphant, herself a widow supporting a family of young children, wrote to her publisher about Victoria’s protracted retirement: ‘A woman is surely a poor creature if with a large happy affectionate family of children around her, she can’t take heart to do her duty whether she likes it or not.’25 Victoria would have been stung by that argument – and intensely angry at its suggestion of duty neglected. That she felt able to censure the recently exiled Isabella II of Spain for ‘misgovernment’ indicates the extent to which she regarded herself as beyond such criticism.26
Quarter of a century ago, Leopold had warned her, ‘Unfortunately, high personages are a little like stage actors – they must make efforts to please their public.’27 Victoria was no longer the malleable girl of 1836 in thrall to her uncle’s wisdom. For five years she resisted opening Parliament. She did so in 1866 only to ensure the safe passage of the grant of an annuity to her third daughter Helena, called ‘Lenchen’. Victoria had recently engaged Lenchen to a balding and penniless princeling, Christian of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg. It was a cynical contract, her means of ensuring that Helena did not leave her but remained on hand to offer the support the grieving Queen regarded as essential from a grown-up daughter: ‘Lenchen is so useful … that I could not give her up without sinking under the weight of my desolation.’28 Amiable and undemonstrative, Christian was a man whose chief distinction lay in the euphoniousness of his empty title and his imperturbably equable disposition; Victoria jibbed at the condition of his teeth and dissipated his energies with the award of meaningless sinecures.
Queen Victoria Page 9