Queen Victoria

by Matthew Dennison

  After a week’s grouse-shooting with Lord and Lady Londesborough at a house party near Scarborough distinguished by the unusually high incidence of diarrhoea, Bertie had returned to Sandringham for his thirtieth birthday. There he and Alix were joined by his sister Alice. His complaints of feeling unwell resulted in a prompt diagnosis. Fresh from administering to Victoria at Balmoral, Alice resumed her recurrent task of nursing. She summoned a royal doctor, William Gull, in place of the local Norfolk practitioner. Reports issued at once to members of the press charted the textbook progression of Bertie’s illness. Within a short space its seemingly relentless advance led from optimism to deepest pessimism.

  The effect on the public of this unexpected and sombre drama was electric. Bertie’s illness gripped the nation. Signs of recovery on 1 December were followed within less than a week by a recrudescence sufficiently alarming to warrant four-hourly bulletins to the press. As the fever entered its third week, Victoria reported receipt of ‘no end of recommendations of remedies of the most mad kind’ from concerned members of the public whose letters and telegrams arrived like a deluge.21 Victoria installed herself at Sandringham, a house she had never previously visited although it was Albert who had negotiated its purchase at the bargain price of £220,000; with her were her children and even peripheral members of the royal family, including the former George of Cambridge, now Duke of Cambridge. What comfort Victoria provided either Bertie or Alix is questionable: her thoughts were inevitably of death. ‘How all reminded me so vividly and sadly of my dearest Albert’s illness,’ she sighed.22 While Victoria ordered domestic arrangements to suit herself, even in the midst of crisis and regardless of the inconvenience to Alix, watchers across the country awaited the latest development. For Victoria was not alone in remembering Albert’s last weeks. Almost miraculously, Bertie’s misfortune had brought about a reconciliation between sovereign and subjects, a widespread expression of sympathy which The Graphic hailed as ‘a satisfactory proof of the loyalty of the nation’.23 For three days Bertie’s life hung in the balance. Not only Victoria but all those at Sandringham, as well as journalists, clergymen and Gladstone, despaired of his recovery. Gull described him as ‘on the very verge of the grave’, adding that ‘hardly anyone has recovered who has been so ill’.24 ‘The worst day of all’ was Wednesday 13 December, the eve of the tenth anniversary of Albert’s death, when every hope faded. Unnecessarily, as it happened, for on 14 December, Bertie rounded the corner.

  In the weeks that followed, with Alix’s eager support and characteristic curmudgeonliness on Victoria’s part, Gladstone made plans for a national service of thanksgiving. That celebration, at St Paul’s Cathedral on 27 February 1872 – a state occasion at the Prime Minister’s insistence – completed the overthrow of the republican animosity Victoria had brought upon herself. Myriad well-wishers packed the bunting-strung streets of the capital; ‘every window was thronged, every tree, lamp-post, and paling were used as perches, and what was really singular was the way in which the sloping London roofs were somehow converted into standing places …’25 Later Victoria described it as ‘a day that can never be forgotten’.26 She had played her part well, dressed in fur-trimmed silk, afterwards acknowledging the cheering crowds from the balcony of Buckingham Palace. Moved by the warmth of her reception, she had displayed an instinct for showmanship otherwise confined to her portraiture, responding to rapturous cheering at Temple Bar by raising Bertie’s hand in her own and kissing it. A relieved Gladstone described Londoners’ beneficence simply and truthfully as ‘a quite extraordinary manifestation of loyalty and affection’. A subsequent request by Dilke that the House of Commons investigate the royal finances met with raucous derision, an ignominious end to a reasonable crusade. Victoria knighted Dr Gull. Whether or not she acknowledged it as such, it represented her thanks for more than illness cured.

  ‘I am an Empress and in common conversation am sometimes called Empress of India. Why have I never officially assumed this title? I feel I ought to do so and wish to have preliminary enquiries made,’ Victoria wrote to Ponsonby on 27 January 1873.27 The idea was one of long gestation. Twenty years earlier, in receipt of spectacular jewels from the Treasury of Lahore, Victoria had commissioned from the Crown Jewellers Garrard & Co. ‘Oriental’ jewellery, including a tiara of ‘Moghul’ arches framing opal-studded diamond lotus flowers; in 1861, under Albert’s guidance, she instituted the Order of the Star of India and held the Order’s first investiture on what she referred to as ‘the second anniversary of my assumption of the Government of India’.28 In all her dealings with the subcontinent, Victoria would retain this personal and possessive note. Enquiries having been set in motion in 1873, her resolve quickly grew. Ponsonby recorded her ‘determination’ to ‘take the additional title of Empress of India’:29 the words were Victoria’s own. Ditto the buoyant spirit of self-assertion, the lofty sense of station and the romantic enthusiasm for an exotic and otherworldly realm she would never visit but which in imagination she claimed as her own particular fiefdom.

  Formally conferred in 1876, the title was widely regarded as Disraeli’s personal gift to the Queen; she in turn rewarded him with a peerage. A cartoon published in Punch on 15 April, ‘New Crowns for Old Ones! (Aladdin Adapted)’, depicted the Prime Minister in the guise of Abanazar offering Victoria a splendid new Indian coronet.30 Nimbly Disraeli had encouraged the suggestion of magic in his relationship with his ‘Faery’. Monarch and minister inhabited an enchanted realm in which, in keeping with his apothegm of never refusing, never contradicting and sometimes forgetting, everything was possible that tended to the happiness of the former. In 1875, for example, he announced the government’s purchase of shares in the Suez Canal as a tribute to Victoria herself: ‘It is just settled: you have it, Madam.’ Inevitably the truth was often less halcyon. Opposition to the Royal Titles Act was vociferous. Associated with the thrones of Russia, Napoleonic France and, since 1871, the newly united Germany, imperial titles suggested to British ears absolutism and a tendency contrary to that spirit of political progress enshrined in two Reform Acts. The bill’s tempestuous passage through Parliament, and hostile references to ‘imperialism’ in sections of the press – the Daily Telegraph, for example, demonised the Act as a ‘sinister revolution’31 – surprised and angered Victoria, who exclaimed against the ‘disgraceful agitation’ of the Opposition;32 her conviction of public support for the measure and all it represented did not waver. Gladstone dismissed the title as ‘theatrical bombast and folly’.33

  If the bombast were Victoria’s, the element of theatricality was Disraeli’s and considered on his part. For Disraeli, Victoria’s additional title asserted the personal rule of the Crown over the colony which had come under direct government control only in 1858, following suppression of the Indian Mutiny, and focused the loyalty of India’s diverse population on the person of the sovereign. To an unconvinced Lord Salisbury, Secretary of State for India, he claimed, ‘What may have been looked upon as an ebullition of personal vanity may bear the semblance of deep and organised policy.’34 At Disraeli’s suggestion, the new Viceroy of India, Lord Lytton, proclaimed Victoria’s title with ‘every possible éclat’ on 1 January 1877, at a durbar of such magnificence that Valentine Prinsep’s painting of the event took three years to complete and, at more than seven metres long, required the artist specially to enlarge his Holland Park studio in order to accommodate the canvas.35 For her part, Victoria chose the simpler medium of photography to broadcast her elevation. She was photographed by W. & D. Downey on the ivory throne presented to her in 1850 by the Maharaja Marthanda Varma of Travancore. She wore a magnificent brooch set with the Koh-i-Noor diamond of the Maharajas of Lahore, which she had previously worn to sit for Winterhalter, and a suitably earnest expression all her own. Although her new title had been intended for use only in connection with imperial matters, from the outset Victoria signed herself VRI, Victoria Regina et Imperatrix (Queen and Empress). Fifteen years after Albert’s death, she h
ad disentangled herself from the entwined ‘V’ and ‘A’ of the dual cipher: the splendour was her own. As she had claimed for herself in 1874, she had become indeed ‘Doyenne of Sovereigns’, gilded with the glitter and spoils of the Orient, secure on her increased throne: a reigning monarch, as she asserted, for almost twenty years longer than that bugbear of the Crimean, the Tsar of Russia. She was fifty-seven years old.

  10

  ‘Mother of many nations’

  FROM DOWNING STREET, Disraeli, now Earl of Beaconsfield, wrote to congratulate Victoria on 13 May 1879 on the birth of her first great-grandchild, Princess Feodora of Saxe-Meiningen. ‘Your Majesty has become the “mother of many nations” … May all, that now occurs, be for your happiness and glory!’1 Victoria herself described the birth of the eldest child of the eldest daughter of her own eldest daughter more simply as ‘quite an event’.2

  That complacent assessment represented a shift in her thinking. A decade earlier, her response to the birth of Bertie and Alix’s second daughter, Princess Victoria of Wales, had been disparaging. To Vicky she had written on 10 July 1868, ‘I fear the seventh granddaughter and fourteenth grandchild becomes a very uninteresting thing – for it seems to me to go on like the rabbits in Windsor Park.’3 Liberated at last from the chrysalis of her gloom, she now increasingly allowed her thoughts to move in channels of which Albert would have approved. On his twenty-first wedding anniversary Albert had described to Stockmar his marriage to Victoria as ‘green and fresh, and [throwing] out vigorous roots, from which I can, with gratitude to God, acknowledge that much good will be engendered to the world’.4 His grandiloquence embraced dynastic intent and a degree of idealism: hindsight mocks his hifalutin certainty. Above all, Albert had dreamed of peace. Those dreams outstripped his own lifespan and also that of his widow; within years of her death all would be shattered. But in her final decades she, who had preferred introspection and withdrawal, again looked outwards. Disraeli had encouraged in Victoria a reappraisal of the possibilities of her position. Giddy with his compliments, exhilarated by her imperial vocation and confident, since 1872, of popular acclaim, she conceived a new role for herself, appropriate in grandeur and extent: ‘mother of many nations’, as Disraeli acclaimed her. To that would be added the homelier epithet of ‘Grandmama of Europe’. This femininised domain suggested a family of nations both imperial and European. Like Albert’s plan for Anglo-Prussian unity, it appeared to safeguard peace but required a puppet-master. That task fell to Victoria. It accounted for the voluminous correspondence she continued almost until her death, and those exhaustive portrait commissions through which, as with Ross’s miniature of Albert so many years before, she asserted hegemony over her nearest and dearest: family likenesses by James Sant, Heinrich von Angeli, Carl Rudolph Sohn and Rudolph Swoboda, which proliferated during the final quarter of the century.

  ‘What Queen in the world has been so rich in offspring and has such good cause to rejoice in her many children?’ asked one observer in 1887.5 In the first years of her marriage, Victoria had protested at the prospect of becoming ‘mamma d’une nombreuse famille’: those protests were short-lived. Quickly, unconsciously, she had learnt to exult in her vigorous brood. When her second daughter, Alice, died of diphtheria on the anniversary of Albert’s death in 1878, aged only thirty-five, Victoria exclaimed painfully, ‘I was so proud of my 9!’6 Five years later, haemophiliac Leopold also died. He was thirty and had been married for two years. Yet the principal characteristic of Victoria and Albert’s children was their robustness: all survived to adulthood and all but Louise presented Victoria with a clutch of grandchildren. By the end of her life, Victoria could boast more than seventy grandchildren and great-grandchildren. In time they would occupy the thrones of Britain, Germany, Spain, Russia, Norway, Greece, Romania, Yugoslavia, Sweden and Denmark. Through Coburg blood Victoria would be connected to the royal houses of Portugal, Belgium, Bulgaria, France, Austria and Italy, a commonwealth of royal kinship. Bishop Randall Davidson’s statement in 1896, that Victoria wielded ‘a personal and domestic influence over the thrones of Europe without precedent in the History of Christendom’ could scarcely have surprised his canny sovereign: within that superb afflatus lay a simple truth.7 Visiting Windsor Castle in 1899, the German Emperor William II, Victoria’s eldest grandchild, stated with characteristic fanfaronade, ‘From this Tower the World is ruled.’8 He ought to have known. That very spring, Victoria warned Nicholas II of Russia, her grandson by marriage, of William’s duplicity. She implored the Tsar for openness and confidentiality: ‘It is so important that we should understand each other, and that such mischievous and unstraightforward proceedings should be put a stop to.’9 Little wonder that another grandchild remembered ‘Grandmama Queen’ as ‘the central power directing things’. The vision they shared was that of Kipling’s ‘The Widow at Windsor’: ‘For the Kings must come down and the Emperors frown/ When the Widow at Windsor says “Stop”!’

  In May 1887, Victoria wrote to her third son, Arthur, describing a sketch recently completed by the Danish artist Laurits Regner Tuxen. It was a preliminary drawing for the large painting she had commissioned from Tuxen to commemorate the family gathering which would assemble that summer to celebrate her Golden Jubilee. Victoria’s intention was for an image that combined decorative appeal with accurate likenesses. ‘It is not to be stiff and according to Etiquette, but prettily grouped,’ she explained.10 The painting would also capture Victoria’s twin roles of monarch and matriarch, a further instance of feminine stereotype invoked to qualify her ‘masculine’ sovereign power as a reigning queen.

  The difficulties of Victoria’s matriarchy swiftly emerged in Tuxen’s efforts to attain his pretty grouping. The Danish-born Princess of Wales refused to stand next to the Crown Prince of Prussia; two decades after Prussia’s part in the Schleswig-Holstein crisis, which had diminished her father’s throne, Alix remained balefully anti-German. Arthur himself announced that he would rather be omitted from the painting than placed near his youngest sister Beatrice and her husband, Henry of Battenberg, whom she had been allowed to marry in 1885 after protracted struggles with her mother. Louise’s husband, Lord Lorne, at first placed prominently on account of the picturesqueness of his Highland dress, was relegated to a less conspicuous position; instead visible Highland garb belongs to Affie’s son, the higher-ranking Prince Alfred of Edinburgh. Despite Victoria’s dismissal of ‘Etiquette’, the two most prominent men are Bertie and Fritz, respectively the Prince of Wales and German Crown Prince. As powerful as the family loyalties of Victoria’s sons- and daughters-in-law were sibling rivalries among her own children. Happily such vituperation is absent from Tuxen’s finished image, which Victoria described as ‘beautiful, the Drawing room admirably painted and the likenesses very good … the grouping and colouring, all, charming’.11 Yet no one was more conscious than she of the tensions that permeated her far-flung family. To her poet laureate Tennyson, she described her children as ‘though all loving, [having] all their own interests and homes’. More than once she insisted that ‘a large family is a great anxiety’; to Vicky she accounted it ‘an immense difficulty & I must add – burthen to me!’12 Today Tuxen’s viewer is impressed above all by the size of Victoria’s family, marshalled in superb plenitude in the Green Drawing Room at Windsor Castle. It was surely part of Victoria’s intention. On three further occasions she commissioned similar group scenes from the artist. All assert unequivocally the grandeur and extent of Victoria’s assembled dynasty.

  Victoria’s increasingly energetic interest in her family was symptomatic of that reinvigoration within her that took place during the second half of the 1870s. In part it arose from the passage of time, dispelling Albert’s shade. Disraeli also played a part. His policy of awakening his Faery Queen worked too well. As contemporaries noted, having rubbed Aladdin’s lamp so hard, he found it impossible again to banish the genie.

  Crises in the Balkans, in which Disraeli supported the ailing Ottoman Empire a
s a bulwark against Russian expansion into southeast Europe, stimulated Victoria to a renewal of that overheated belligerence she had espoused during the Crimean War. In language, thought and action she disdained moderation. She was bellicose, adamant, emotive. As poet Alfred Austin described her after her death, ‘She bore the trident, wore the helm.’13 In 1877, she identified as her ‘one object’ ‘the honour and dignity of this country’.14 Briefly she reprised her role of John Bull in petticoats: the maintenance of ‘honour and dignity’ demanded a vigorous show of pugnacity and strength. ‘You say you hope we shall keep out of the [Russo-Turkish] war and God knows I hope and pray and think we shall – as to fighting,’ she wrote to Vicky in June. ‘But I am sure you would not wish Great Britain to eat humble pie to these horrible, deceitful, cruel Russians? I will not be the sovereign to submit to that!’15 Mostly she directed her vigour towards inspiring Disraeli and his Cabinet. ‘Be bold!’ she exhorted. For emphasis she threatened abdication five times in ten months. Daily she bombarded the Prime Minister with letters and telegrams. To the intense irritation of Bertie, whom she continued to exclude from official business, she resorted to employing in her machinations her youngest son Leopold, a Conservative partisan who would later represent her at Disraeli’s funeral. His role as an extra private secretary enabled Victoria to bypass Henry Ponsonby with his Liberal sympathies and admonishments to a course of greater caution.

  For opinion in the country at large was divided. Gladstone had re-emerged from retirement to lambast Turkish atrocities against Bulgarian Christians: the ultimate victim of his campaign, which included a bestselling pamphlet The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East, was Disraeli. Victoria’s line was nationalistic and patriotic: it was also overtly party political. Priding herself on her ability to judge the national mood and certain, as she would always be, that her own wishes coincided with the country’s best interests, Victoria, like Disraeli, miscalculated. The latter’s resounding defeat at the polls in 1880 was a catastrophe for his adoring and dependent sovereign. ‘What your loss to me as a Minister would be, it is impossible to estimate,’ she told him frankly.16 Either desperation or determination inspired her attempts to make Lord Hartington or Lord Granville prime minister; it was soon obvious that Gladstone must be invited to return. As in Melbourne’s replacement by Peel, Victoria felt she could hardly bear it, ‘a most disagreeable person – half crazy, and so excited’.17 With unwitting irony she labelled him ‘arrogant, tyrannical and obstinate’. His real crime was a perceived lack of regard for her own feelings (presumably in snatching victory against her will); later she would fulminate against ‘the utter disregard of all my opinions which after 45 years of experience ought to be considered’.18 In the short term, she concealed her chagrin behind more worthy concerns: ‘The Queen cannot deny she … thinks it a great calamity for the country and the peace of Europe!’19 To Ponsonby she suggested abdicating rather than working alongside her bête noire.