Queen Victoria

by Matthew Dennison

  In a remarkably short space of time, Brown had become indispensable to Victoria: rather than communicating directly with her equerries, she did so through Brown, in Victoria’s mind a conduit, too often a barrier between Queen and court. There were rumours too that he spied on Victoria’s behalf. His unambiguous loyalty qualified him for a position of trust; the abrasiveness of his manner and his temper, his laconic brusqueness and granite-hard insolence, seemed to jeer at the perpetually ruffled feathers of Victoria’s hothouse court. Too many of those in waiting roundly detested Balmoral; Brown’s lordly ubiquity redoubled that disaffection. Accommodation was cramped and icy, Victoria stubbornly convinced of the health-giving properties of cold air; the weather was joyless and the atmosphere one of unrelenting tedium as Victoria sat spinning Aberdeenshire flax at her spinning wheel and listening to the poetry of Robert Burns; members of the household were circumscribed even in smoking. In addition, the greater degree of informality Victoria embraced in her Highland holiday home eroded those finer distinctions of hierarchy by which members of the household set store. The below stairs world became a Brown suzerainty with the employment of several of John Brown’s brothers. Their regime lacked kindliness – even towards Victoria’s family. Off duty, Brown drank to excess. Courtiers seethed. Impotently, Victoria’s children nurtured mounting grievances. It was Victoria’s own attendants who first dubbed her Brown’s wife, a calumny born of spite or possibly amusement. Perhaps they meant to shame her into a separation.20 They were no match for Victoria’s obduracy and misguided to attempt coercion by force: their efforts failed. With less hope of victory, the princesses dismissed Brown airily as ‘mama’s lover’.

  Six years after Landseer’s death, Victoria called on painter Charles Burton Barber to make a second version of Her Majesty at Osborne in 1866. The later painting reproduces the first composition with significant differences. Osborne is replaced by Balmoral and a backdrop less manicured; gone are signs of Victoria’s occupation and the decorative chaperonage of her daughters. Instead, in this second image, which Victoria gave to John Brown as a present in 1876, the same year she gave him a cottage at Balmoral, nothing detracts from the focus on the drama’s chief protagonists. In Queen Victoria seated on ‘Florrie’, John Brown in Attendance, Balmoral in the Distance, Brown stares fixedly at the pony’s face. Victoria stares at Brown. It is a pregnant moment.

  By 1876, for Victoria’s contemporaries, the scandal of ‘Mrs Brown’ was past. Victoria herself had done nothing to address it. Rather her slow return to royal duties and her increasing visibility, with Brown invariably in attendance in public, denied grounds for suspicion of a liaison that was evidently neither clandestine nor furtive. In 1867, for the first time, Victoria had been provided with the services of a private secretary, the affable but not entirely sympathetic General Charles Grey; in 1870, he was succeeded by the better-suited Henry Ponsonby: wry, astute, of superhuman tact and unflagging patience, politically moderate and respectful without sycophancy. The presence of both men lessened some of Victoria’s reliance on John Brown. Victoria understood the nature of the tittle-tattle that briefly came close to undermining her: with some justification she attributed it to ‘ill-natured gossip in the higher classes’. In the summer of 1867, when feelings ran high following display of Landseer’s painting, she had confronted that ill-natured gossip. She had refused to attend a military review in Hyde Park without John Brown’s ‘strong arm’ to support her, despite the Prime Minister, Lord Derby, warning her that demonstrations were planned against Brown. Victoria smelled a rat: a bully herself, she understood when she was being bullied. She expressed herself ‘much astonished and shocked’ at the attempts to manipulate her and frighten her into leaving Brown at home. Monarch and ministers swiftly reached an impasse, which was broken only by the death by shooting squad of the Emperor of Mexico, a royal cousin by marriage. A grateful government cancelled the review. Victoria reverted to default mode, reiterating her mantra, ‘The Queen will not be dictated to’. As in her dealings with Sir Robert Peel over the Bedchamber Crisis, she appeared to have carried the day; victory by intransigence.

  Before John Brown’s death on 27 March 1883, Victoria increased his salary on at least three occasions. She formally designated him ‘Esquire’. In letters from mistress to servant, she signed herself ‘your faithful friend’, confident that her friendship was returned.21 She was not mistaken. It was, in fact, the principal service John Brown had rendered Victoria. Unwittingly he had encouraged her in a course of escapism that tarnished her popularity and significantly damaged the monarchy. At her death, his photograph was placed inside her coffin, held within the stiff, unbending fingers of her left hand.

  9

  ‘Wisest counsellors’

  ‘ONE OF THE kindest, truest and best friends and wisest counsellors she ever had’, re-entered Victoria’s life in the 1860s. His florid chivalry and sumptuous flattery mitigated any sneering behind the cordons of the Royal Academy or in scurrilous weekly papers, and obliterated those uncertain first impressions Victoria had formed of him two decades earlier as an opponent of Peel. His name was Benjamin Disraeli. From 1866 he served as Chancellor of the Exchequer in Lord Derby’s Tory government. In February 1868, following the passing of a second Reform Act, which Victoria approved, and Derby’s retirement through gout, which she also approved, Disraeli became prime minister. He served for a mere nine months before losing the general election to Gladstone’s Liberals, but returned in 1874, aged seventy, for a second term. Famously he referred to Victoria as ‘the Faery’. He likened her to the fairy queen Titania, her realm a bower – notwithstanding her portliness and the high colour she derived from overeating, wilfulness, nervous apprehension and excessively cold rooms. The suggestion of magic in these dainty gallantries was his not hers.

  Never had magic been more necessary than as Victoria entered her fifties. Of the State Opening of Parliament in December 1857, Lady Charlotte Schreiber had written: ‘The Queen was received with very little enthusiasm, and … it was a flat affair.’1 A decade of sorrowful concealment had further diminished popular enthusiasm for the lachrymose monarch. She had failed to respond to every call to resume her former life of pomp and ceremony. In 1865, Punch published a cartoon inspired by The Winter’s Tale. It reimagined the moment of Hermione’s magical reawakening from statue to living flesh in Act 5. In the cartoon Victoria takes on the role of Hermione, turned to stone, Britannia upbraiding her: ‘Tis time! Descend! Be stone no more!’ All in vain. Victoria had begun to depend on her seclusion as proof of her continuing fidelity to Albert’s memory; the masquerade of grief absolved her from distasteful exertions. Instead, in 1868, she found an alternative means of displaying herself to public view.

  Against the wishes of her children, she published Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands. A selection of diary extracts from 1842 to 1868, carefully edited to convey an impression of wholesome if unceasing royal leisure at Balmoral, the book earned Victoria fulsome plaudits in the popular press and impressive sales figures (Leaves outsold, for example, Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone and Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book, both also published in 1868). In addition, as The Times averred, it permitted her subjects to be ‘the sharers in her own personal joys and sorrows’, a policy which would ultimately reap dividends in re-cementing Crown and country.2 Its runaway success delighted Victoria. Disingenuously she wrote to Theodore Martin on 16 January, ‘What has she done to be so loved & liked?’, a more pertinent question than she apparently realised and one that Martin quailed to address directly.3 At the same time, among a vocal minority, publication stimulated criticism of an otiose existence of picnics, sketching and flannel petticoats for cottagers that offered the nation a poor return on the annual Civil List payment of £385,000: Leaves forcibly drew attention to precisely those aspects of Victoria’s behaviour which served to weaken the bond between sovereign and people. It reiterated her widow’s grief, dedicated ‘to the dear memory of him who made
the life of the writer bright and happy’, and was thickly larded with references to Highland servants. Conspicuous among the latter was John Brown. A typical entry, for 18 September 1858, depicts Brown helping to carry Victoria through wet grass, borne aloft on his shoulders. Such insights confirmed the misgivings of Victoria’s detractors, further swelling ranks which were already worryingly bloated. From Berlin, Vicky observed with concern that the dangers of republicanism were ‘daily spreading’.

  With what she regarded as his ‘poetry, romance and chivalry’ – though an eye to the preservation of the status quo might be a nearer explanation – Disraeli had taken pains throughout his fleeting premiership to reignite Victoria’s awareness of her place in the political system. He cultivated an appearance of relying on her assistance with the great affairs of state. Lengthily he wrote to her, employing to the full those gifts which had made him a bestselling novelist. Smilingly he insisted that ‘all his own thoughts and feelings and duties and affections are now concentrated in your Majesty’,4 and outlined ‘every scrap of political news dressed up to serve his own purpose, and every scrap of social gossip cooked to amuse her’. His cynicism hit its target. Victoria ‘declare[d] that she ha[d] never had such letters in her life … and that she never before knew everything!’5 Given that the overwhelming interest to Victoria of Disraeli’s first ministry was a series of Church appointments, matters debated behind closed doors, and the future of the Irish Church, the assiduous conjurer nonetheless failed to lure his Faery out of her hidden bowers back into the public gaze. In 1868, Gladstone, lacking Disraeli’s black arts, inherited a queen still set on a course of determined seclusion and a population, Leaves or no Leaves, no longer over-sympathetic to her perpetual woes.

  But Gladstone was a man of conviction and resolve. In the time he could spare from the equally thorny business of pacifying Ireland, he set about ending Victoria’s retirement. In neither aim did he meet with notable success. That year, Victoria built her ‘Widow’s House’, the Glassalt Shiel. Two and a half miles from Balmoral, in an isolated clearing thick with midges, it was ‘a silent place, the quietness only broken by the trickle of a waterfall high above and the cries of water birds’.6 She described it as ‘the only place in the world where I can have complete rest’.7 Four-square and, to outsiders, cheerless, it expressed in concrete form Victoria’s continuing reclusiveness. At Brown’s suggestion she even smoked to keep the midges at bay. Its very inaccessibility kept all else at bay.

  With an ill grace, Victoria agreed to open Joseph Cubbit’s new Blackfriars Bridge, a Venetian Gothic fantasy of granite and colourfully painted wrought iron, on 6 November 1869, attended by a mounted escort and the full panoply of royal parade; she insisted her compliance ‘must NEVER be made a precedent’ and again declined to open Parliament. Bertie added his entreaties to those of the Prime Minister, with predictable results. ‘We live in radical times,’ he told his mother, ‘and [the] more the people see the Sovereign, the better it is for the people and the country.’8 As ever, Victoria’s response to confrontation was unreasoning rebuttal. Her growing conviction that Gladstone meant to harry her into acting against her wishes served to harden her implacability and soured relations with a prime minister to whom she was at first tolerably well disposed. By the autumn of 1869 she was writing to Vicky, ‘I cannot find him very agreeable.’9 Although Albert had once approved of Gladstone’s high-mindedness and religiosity, Victoria would ultimately loathe him. He was wordy, conscientious and theoretical. She refused to admire his idealism, with its challenge to her own petty selfishness. Eventually she dismissed him as a lunatic, ‘that half-mad firebrand’.10 She suspected him of inclining towards dictatorship, while John Brown encouraged further wariness on religious grounds: Gladstone’s High Church zeal offended the anti-Catholicism of mistress and ghillie. Disraeli was theatrical. About Gladstone, preoccupied in his own words with ‘candle-ends and cheese-parings’, hung a whiff of the mercantile trade (grain and sugar) on which his family’s fortune was based – as Disraeli dismissed him aphoristically, ‘preaching, praying, speechifying or scribbling, never a gentleman’. To Disraeli, Victoria dispatched boxes of primroses from Windsor, acknowledging his status as ageing cavalier, with his black-dyed ringlets and perfumed compliments. She sent him a collection of Albert’s speeches, bound and inscribed, and in time Koberwein’s copy of her most formidable portrait, by Heinrich von Angeli, tactfully described by Vicky as ‘a trifle stern and set’;11 it hung in the ‘Gallery of Affection’ at his house in Buckinghamshire. Despite his wife’s encouragement, Gladstone could not, like his opponent, ‘pet the Queen’. And so he failed to convince her of the depths of his reverence for the institution she embodied and his personal determination to safeguard her position.

  By the beginning of the 1870s that position was more precarious than it had ever been. Support for republicanism, arguably never a serious threat, nevertheless scaled new levels and inspired widespread misgivings. Victoria continued to assert with customary vehemence that she had ‘failed in none of her regal duties. 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.’12 But people were indeed unable to understand. For many of her subjects, Victoria’s absenteeism downgraded her to queen in name alone. The Prince of Wales, by contrast, was all too prominent: ‘no one looks up to him, though all like him’, Victoria surmised.13 In 1870, Bertie found himself conspicuously embroiled in a society divorce case which dissipated much of that liking. Letters from Bertie to the errant wife, Lady Mordaunt, were read out in court. The letters themselves were notable for their blandness, and the behaviour of Harriett Mordaunt indicated mental derangement, but the damaging effect on Bertie’s reputation of such unlovely associations was considerable. It was against this background that Victoria agreed to open Parliament. It was noted, however, that her willingness coincided with the engagement of her fourth daughter Louise to the Marquess of Lorne and Arthur’s attainment of his majority, both events she intended to be marked by her government with financial settlements. This final suggestion of calculating avarice prompted publication of the anonymous pamphlet, What Does She Do With It?, which provided a rallying point for Victoria’s critics.

  The author, Liberal MP George Trevelyan, argued that, in abandoning the pageantry of monarchy, Victoria was hoarding up to £200,000 of public money every year, exploiting her widowhood and constant nervous indisposition to set aside hefty profits for the Privy Purse. Newspapers took up the cry. When Victoria, claiming illness, departed for Balmoral before the end of the Parliamentary session, her behaviour – self-indulgent and petulantly uncooperative as it appeared – prompted a full-scale witch-hunt.

  She had cried wolf once too often. Ironically, in this instance, Victoria was ill. On 22 August 1871, she wrote, ‘Never since I was a girl, when I had typhoid fever at Ramsgate in ’35, have I felt so ill.’14 After a throat infection, she developed an abscess on her arm six inches in diameter; it was followed by a severe attack of gout and rheumatoid arthritis. She lost the use of her legs and was forced to use a wheeled chair, John Brown the only person strong enough to lift her in and out of the chair and even in and out of bed. Such was the pain in her arm that she dictated her journal to her youngest daughter. Gladstone had condemned her refusal not to alter the date of her departure for the Highlands – ‘smaller and meaner causes for the decay of Thrones cannot be conceived’;15 afterwards he relented. So, too, Victoria’s children, who had planned jointly to send their mother a letter, written by Vicky, imploring Victoria to end her seclusion and banish the spectre of revolution. The letter was never sent. The Times apologised for its erstwhile scepticism, while The Daily News drew a picture of a nation chastened and ashamed.16 It was not enough.

  On 6 November 1871, while Victoria convalesced at Balmoral, a youthful MP called Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke addressed a meeting of working men in Newcastle.
His subject was the need for an alternative to the monarchy in the face of Victoria’s dereliction of duty, and Dilke’s audience applauded him heartily. ‘There is a widespread belief that a Republic here is only a matter of education and time,’ he stated. ‘If you can show me a fair chance that a Republic here will be free from the political corruption that hangs about the Monarchy, I say, for my part … let it come.’17 From her sickbed Victoria roused herself to respond with fury. Gladstone, who regarded republicanism as ‘a distemper’, attempted to soothe her with assurances that he considered the matter one of ‘grave public importance’.18

  Ten years had passed since Albert’s death. In 1863, Stockmar had also died, followed two years later by Victoria’s uncle Leopold. Jointly the three men had conceived of the reform of Britain’s throne, an overhaul in the wake of late-Georgian folly. Victoria was queen in a new mould, service and duty her watchwords, her court exemplary for its moral probity. Victoria’s Britain had resisted revolution in 1848, the year of European convulsions. Even the collapse of the Second Empire in France and the exile to an ugly house at Chislehurst of Napoleon III and his lovely Empress Eugénie had not toppled Victoria’s throne. But the clamour was rising. In Hyde Park, a republican rally attracted large crowds. Parliament’s vote of a dowry of £30,000 to Princess Louise provoked boisterous criticism at public meetings in Nottingham and Birmingham. The Pall Mall Gazette reported ‘republicanism of a very revolutionary form flooding in’.19 All at a moment when Victoria was too weak to defend herself against such slings and arrows. Salvation came from the one quarter she would never have countenanced: her eldest son, Bertie.

  On 22 November 1871, Victoria’s journal records: ‘Breakfasted for the first time again with my children, and I felt it was a step forward and I was returning to ordinary life.’ Her tone of relief proved short-lived. She went on to confirm that she been informed that ‘dear Bertie had “mild typhoid fever”’. Unsurprisingly this typhoid widow described her reaction as one of anxiety.20