Inevitably Karim was none of the things he had claimed for himself. Nor did his character correspond with Victoria’s verdict of gentlemanliness, high-mindedness or excellence. He was dishonest, overbearing, silly and self-important. Sexually promiscuous, he contracted gonorrhoea. He stole a brooch belonging to Victoria and was suspected of leaking sensitive information about British policy in India to anti-British organisations. Protests were made: Victoria refused to listen.
Throughout her life, strength of opposition served merely to stiffen her resolve. So it proved again in the case of Abdul Karim. Victoria’s love affair with India was of long duration. Her engagement with the subcontinent was imaginative, romantic, possessive, fanciful, but kindly. As she wrote to one of her daughters-in-law, ‘I have such a great longing sometime to go to India.’9 It was not to be. Instead fragments of India travelled to her: aside from her Indian attendants, her ivory throne; historic jewels of cursed and bloody history; illuminated manuscripts; hostages to fortune like Dalip Singh, the dispossessed Maharaja of the Punjab, who settled in Gloucestershire on a government pension, and Princess Gouramma of Coorg, flirtatious and consumptive, an unlikely goddaughter for Victoria. In 1890–91 she added the Durbar Room to Osborne House, inspired by Arthur’s cod-Indian billiard room at Bagshot Park and the need for a state entertaining space. An icing sugar confection of fretted and snowy plasterwork undertaken under the supervision of Kipling’s father, its scale was suitably imperial. Its design made concessions to authenticity: its carpet was woven in the women’s prison at Agra, its curtains of coarse cloth hand-blocked with an Indian-inspired paisley motif. At Osborne and elsewhere, including the spring holidays to Italy and the South of France which were a feature of her last years, Victoria insisted that her Indian attendants, like her Highlanders, wore native costume at all times. Balmoral winters necessitated ‘native’ fashions made from tweed.
At one level, Karim was another exotic trophy for this ageing empress and commended to her by his dark good looks; he also delighted her with knowledge and understanding of the country she was unable to visit in person. Unusually for her time, Victoria was without racial prejudice. Emphatically she expressed ‘her very strong feeling (and she had few stronger) that the natives and coloured races should be treated with every kindness and affection, as brothers, not – as, alas! Englishmen too often do – as totally different to ourselves …’10 In 1898, she complained that Indians were under-represented in the Birthday Honours. As she soon discovered, neither household nor relatives shared her enlightenment. At court, complaints about Karim proliferated: he was ‘bland, smiling, furtive and scheming’.11 The gentlemen of the household refused to associate with him on terms of equality, the women recoiled from his serpentine presence. ‘I am for ever meeting him in passages or the garden or face to face on the stairs,’ recorded maid of honour Marie Mallet in 1899, ‘and each time I shudder more.’12 It was trivial and unedifying, snobbish and distasteful. Victoria was predictably unamused. In her disgruntlement she grew formidable, once sweeping every object from her desk in her fury at another row about the munshi.
The more frequent the complaints against Karim, the stronger grew Victoria’s conviction that her household’s objections arose from racist motives. She considered too that her hand was being forced – always a counterproductive approach. The result was an impasse. Karim himself provided a resolution of sorts. A photograph appeared in The Daily Graphic in October 1897: Victoria sits at her desk signing documents, while Karim looks on, impassive and majestic. It was a reversal of the true order of their relationship, an affront consolidated by the caption: ‘The Queen’s Life in the Highlands, Her Majesty receiving a lesson in Hindustani from the Munshi Hafiz Abdul Karim C.I.E.’.13 To her doctor Victoria admitted that she had been made to look foolish. Still Karim remained a fixture. Increasingly he fought his battles not with those equerries who spurned him but with Victoria herself, unable to restrain his overbearingness. A bemused Lord Salisbury concluded that Victoria enjoyed the ‘emotional excitement’ of their sparring.
This was not, however, a decade of anger and embitterment; as Lytton Strachey described them, these were the years of apotheosis.14 Victoria had fought hard to prevent her youngest daughter Beatrice from marrying. That marriage, to Prince Henry of Battenberg, called ‘Liko’, solemnised on the Isle of Wight in 1885, breathed new life into Victoria’s moribund court. Liko was handsome and patient. He treated his mother-in-law with skittish deference. She in turn described him as ‘like a bright sunbeam in My Home’.15 The couple lived continually at Victoria’s side, in apartments created specially for them in Osborne’s Durbar wing. Victoria took up dancing again. Again she sang duets, breaking off to remind her audience that her singing masters had included Mendelssohn. Again she watched plays. It was Bertie who reintroduced his mother to the theatre: command performances again became a feature of court life. Again there were tableaux vivants, elaborately costumed, prepared for over several weeks, again Victoria’s children taking the principal parts as they had in similar tableaux while Albert was alive, now joined by grandchildren too: Beatrice as a matronly Queen of Sheba; Bertie’s eldest son Eddy as Charles Edward the Young Pretender; the future Tsarina of Russia, Princess Alix of Hesse, in the guise of novice nun. In November 1891, following a performance of Cavalleria Rusticana in the Waterloo Gallery at Windsor Castle, Victoria noted, ‘I had not heard an Italian opera for thirty-one years … I loved the music.’16 It was a return to happiness – amid the anniversaries of deaths an acknowledgement of many blessings. To Marie Mallet, Victoria confessed that she who had once prayed to die now clung to life.
And yet steadily the death toll mounted. On 14 January 1892, days after his twenty-eighth birthday and within weeks of his proposed wedding to Princess May of Teck, Bertie’s son Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale, known as Eddy, died of pneumonia: he ought to have succeeded his grandmother and father as king. So enfeebled was Jane, Lady Ely, by a widowhood in Victoria’s service that she was unable to manage her knife and fork by the time of her death in June 1890: to her employer’s surprise, her food was cut up for her.17 Overwork similarly claimed Victoria’s private secretary Sir Henry Ponsonby, who died in November 1895 following a severe stroke, after quarter of a century’s devoted service. Smarting under his ornamental existence as courtly swain, Liko escaped to Africa and the Ashanti War against King Prempeh. He swiftly contracted malaria and died on 20 January 1896. Most trying of all had been the death from cancer of the larynx of Vicky’s husband Fritz, after a reign of only ninety-nine days in 1888. The demise of the ‘Barbarossa of German liberalism’, a personal blow to Victoria, also spelled the death knell to Albert’s tattered dreams of Anglo-German unity. Fritz’s successor, William II, treated his grandmother with outward respect while espousing on Germany’s behalf policies of inconsistency and vainglory, which nurtured dangerous tensions between the two empires. The outcome of those tensions in 1914 was shielded from Victoria.
Instead one last huzzah awaited her: her Diamond Jubilee, the first in British history. Even its name was a new coinage by private secretary Arthur Bigge, in preference to ‘Jubilissimee’, ‘Jubilificence’ and ‘The Queen’s Commemoration’. A decade previously, at a Golden Jubilee party for schoolchildren in Hyde Park, Victoria had received a bouquet. Attached was an embroidered message, ‘God bless our Queen, not Queen alone, but Mother, Queen and friend’.18 At the suggestion of Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain, once mistrusted by Victoria as ‘Gladstone’s evil genius’, the Diamond Jubilee would celebrate Victoria as imperial ‘mother’, a matriarchy greater and grander than her role as Grandmama of Europe. ‘There has never been in English territory any representation of the Empire as a whole,’ Chamberlain told Lord Salisbury, ‘and the Colonies especially have, hitherto, taken little part in any ceremony of the kind.’19 Victoria released an official Jubilee photograph in which cascades of Honiton lace lightened her widow’s weeds and extensive diamonds imbued with an appropria
tely sombre magnificence this sovereign of 200 million worldwide subjects;20 the photograph itself had been taken four years earlier. Before she left Buckingham Palace for the short celebration of thanksgiving outside St Paul’s Cathedral – Victoria was too lame to mount the cathedral steps and remained in her carriage – she telegraphed a message across her far-flung Empire: ‘From my heart I thank my beloved people, May God bless them!’ In their thousands, her beloved people lined the streets to cheer her. ‘No one ever, I believe, has met with such an ovation as was given to me, passing through those six miles of streets.’21 Colonial troops were among soldiers lining the way; they also packed the cathedral precincts. ‘Until we saw it passing through the streets of our city we never quite realised what the Empire meant,’ exulted the Daily Mail.22 According to The Spectator, ‘The note of the entire festivity was imperialism.’23
Victoria died on 22 January 1901 at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. The century died with her; so too that palace by the sea, built by Victoria and Albert and never again a royal home. Her children and her grandchildren were at her bedside, her final hours every bit as public as those of her husband or indeed as any of the significant moments of her long and necessarily prominent life. She died, as she had lived and reigned, outwardly assertive, honest in her self-appraisal, ‘in peace with all, fully aware of my many faults’,24 but reluctant, when it came to it, finally to relinquish control.
‘The afternoon of the 21st was a most disturbing time,’ Lord Lorne wrote to Tennyson’s son, Hallam. ‘The breathing seemed so often clogged, and the intimation was several times made by the Doctor that the death must come, and still it could not come, the strong heart still resisting the attack. My wife was on her knees for nearly 4 hours holding her mother’s hand.’25 At the end, Victoria’s final thoughts were of her husband, her last words: ‘Oh, Albert …’
In death she lies alongside Albert in the mausoleum she herself constructed. While the Albert of Marochetti’s tomb effigy gazes heavenward, his Victoria turns her face towards him.
PICTURE SECTION
A sentimental image of dynastic intent, William Beechey’s portrait of the infant Victoria with her mother, the Duchess of Kent, asserts her right to rule: in her hand she clasps a miniature of her deceased father.
‘Striking … though not entirely correct’ was Victoria’s assessment of the first of Henry Tanworth Wells’ paintings of the moment the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Chamberlain informed her of her accession on 20 June 1837. Wells’ painting – undertaken fifty years later – is a romantic reimagining of that ‘historical incident’.
In this unabashedly regal portrait of 1843, Francis Grant references only Victoria’s role as queen.
A youthful Victoria is depicted in an informal setting surrounded by flowers in the second year of her reign.
On different occasions Victoria dismissed official portraits of the ‘dear Being’ Lord Melbourne as ‘too old and not handsome enough’ and ‘not in my opinion half pleasing enough’. Here she attempted her own sketch of her first, best-loved prime minister.
Prussian sculptor Emil Wolff depicted Albert as a Greek warrior. Victoria thought it ‘very beautiful’ but Albert later commissioned a second, less ‘undressed’ version.
At the first of the three great fancy dress balls given by Victoria, on 12 May 1842 she appeared as Queen Philippa, Albert as Edward III. Her costume, here recorded for posterity by Landseer, was based on the Westminster Abbey tomb effigy of the medieval queen, on which Edward, famously devoted to his bride, lavished £3,000 in 1369.
In words and pictures, the popular press dwelt on the royal couple’s conspicuous happiness and domestic bliss.
In 1845, Victoria paid Franz Xaver Winterhalter £105 for this group portrait in which she appears alongside her four eldest children (from left: the Princess Royal, Princess Alice, Prince Alfred and the Prince of Wales).
Victoria’s own badge of the Order of Victoria and Albert, c. 1862–3, on which, uniquely, the position of the portraits of husband and wife was reversed.
Photographs like this one, depicting Victoria with Alice and Louise and a portrait of the recently deceased Albert, encouraged some observers to discern in her mourning a theatrical dimension.
In Victoria’s mind a picture of shadows – ‘as I am now, sad & lonely’ – Landseer’s famous Her Majesty at Osborne in 1866 gave rise to ribald comment on public exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1867.
The windowed Victoria at one of her collection of spinning wheels, an unsympathetic image of stolidly unrelenting gloom.
Victoria commissioned Tuxen’s sumptuous group portrait to commemorate the family gathering of her Golden Jubilee in 1887.
At the end of her life, Victoria declined to grant Jean Joseph Benjamin-Constant proper sittings. His portrait of 1899 has an ethereal quality, which seems to foreshadow Victoria’s death as well as investing her with intimations of immortality.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1 David Thomson, England in the Nineteenth Century (Penguin reprint, London, 1986), p. 169.
2 Ibid., p. 169.
3 Ibid., p. 170.
4 Giles St Aubyn, Queen Victoria: A Portrait (Sinclair Stevenson, London, 1991), p. 169.
5 Walter Bagehot (ed. Miles Taylor), The English Constitution (Oxford World Classics reprint, Oxford, 2009), p. 34.
CHAPTER ONE
1 Walter L. Arnstein, Queen Victoria (Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2003), p. 131.
2 Manchester Guardian, 24 June 1837.
3 Cecil Woodham-Smith, Victoria 1819–1861 (Hamish Hamilton, London, 1972), p. 47.
4 Mrs Oliphant, Queen Victoria: A Personal Sketch (Cassell and Company, London, 1901), p. 1.
5 Kate Williams, Becoming Queen (Hutchinson, London, 2008), p. 157.
6 Lynne Vallone, Becoming Victoria (Yale University Press, 2001), p. 1.
7 Dormer Creston, The Youthful Queen Victoria (Macmillan & Co., London, 1952), p. 23.
8 Ibid., p. 85.
9 David Duff, Edward of Kent (Frederick Muller reprint, London, 1973), p. 164.
10 Venetia Murray, High Society in the Regency Period (Penguin, London, 1999), p. 18.
11 Woodham-Smith, op. cit., p. 28.
12 Elizabeth Longford, Victoria RI (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1964), p. 20.
13 Flora Fraser, Princesses: The Six Daughters of George III (John Murray, London, 2004), p. 321.
14 Margaret Homans, and Adrienne Munich, eds., Remaking Queen Victoria (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997), p. 60.
15 RA Geo 45503–4, quoted Vallone, op. cit., p. 3.
16 John Raymond, ed., Queen Victoria’s Early Letters (Batsford, London, 1963).
17 RA M4–26, Duchess of Kent to Earl Grey, 28 January 1831.
18 Roger Fulford, ed., Dearest Child: Letters from Queen Victoria and the Princess Royal, 1858–1861 (Evans Brothers, London, 1964), p. 125.
19 Theo Aronson, Grandmama of Europe (John Murray paperback, London, 1984), p. 7.
20 Vallone, op. cit., p. 3.
21 Ibid., p. 19.
22 Duff, op. cit., p. 287.
CHAPTER TWO
1 W. H. Hudson, Birds in London (Longmans, Green and Co., London, 1898), see pp. 77–85.
2 Creston, op. cit., p. 65.
3 Vallone, op. cit., p. 200.
4 Arnstein, op. cit., p. 24.
5 Elizabeth Barrett, ‘Victoria’s Tears’.
6 St Aubyn, op. cit., p. 121.
7 Katherine Hudson, A Royal Conflict: Sir John Conroy and the Young Victoria (Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1994), p. 16.
8 See Fraser, op. cit., p. 360.
9 Creston, op. cit., p. 83.
10 Malcolm Johnson, Bustling Intermeddler? The Life and Work of Charles James Blomfield (Gracewing paperback, Leominster, 2001), p. 41.
11 Stanley Weintraub, Victoria: Biography of a Queen (Unwin, London, 1987), p. 56.
12 Vallone, op. cit., p. 45.
13 Edgar Fe
uchtwanger, Albert and Victoria: The Rise and Fall of the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (Hambledon Continuum, London, 2006), p. 9.
14 Homans, op. cit., p. 61.
15 RA VIC M5/19, quoted Vallone, op. cit., p. 72.
16 RA VIC/MAIN/Z/111, p. 7.
17 Theodore Martin, Queen Victoria As I Knew Her (William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh and London, 1908), p. 64.
18 Vallone, op. cit., p. 20.
19 Weintraub, op. cit., p. 63.
20 Arnstein, op. cit., p. 21.
21 Longford, op. cit., p. 48.
22 Dorothy Marshall, The Life and Times of Queen Victoria (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1972), p. 30.
23 RA VIC 61/22.
24 RA VIC/MAIN/Y/203/81.
25 Laurence Housman, Happy and Glorious: A Dramatic Biography (The Reprint Society, London, 1943), p. 9.
26 Richard Williams, The Contentious Crown: Public Discussion of the British Monarchy in the Reign of Queen Victoria (Ashgate, Aldershot, 1997), p. 193.
27 Feuchtwanger, op. cit., p. 11.
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