by Roland Perry
‘Don’t concern yourself,’ Bertie consoled her. ‘I shall make sure we get back all potentially damaging material.’
43
SYMBOLISM OVER INVALIDISM
Victoria battled on as queen long beyond her used-by date. Early in 1900 she was concerned about the news from the Second War in South Africa against the Boers and world reaction to it.The conflict had dragged on and British troops had incurred high casualties, distressing Victoria. There were stories of gross incompetence at the highest levels, which led her to believe that making her son Arthur army commander might turn things around. She met him and Bertie at Balmoral to plot a strategy and a royal succession in the armed forces that might make a difference.
‘Mama, I am not sure I am qualified for the role,’ Arthur confessed.
‘Poppycock! You are royal.You are qualified from birth!’
‘It may put some generals’ noses out of joint, Mama,’ Bertie remarked.
Victoria was miffed.
‘I don’t understand either of you,’ she said with a frown. ‘If you are concerned about qualification,then I suggest that some of my grandchildren join the Horse Guards and create a career path to higher command later.’
Neither man responded, indicating they were lukewarm to the idea.
‘The thirteenth Lord Elphinstone began that way,’ Victoria went on, ‘and his performance in India suggests he would have been an admirable commander-in-chief.’
Bertie blinked. He was astonished that his mother would refer to her one-time lover.
‘Mama, it’s a different era,’ Arthur began bravely. ‘You can’t expect your grandchildren to follow the paths of those leaders of half a century ago.’
‘There are many more enticing and rewarding things to do now,’ Bertie said with a supportive nod for his younger brother, ‘especially in things like property investment, business and diplomacy.’
There was a chilly silence before Victoria said:‘You both disappoint me. Arthur, I shall write to Salisbury and express my desire that you be head of the army in my lifetime.’
A few days later, Prime Minister Salisbury received the letter and mumbled to his secretary: ‘Bloody nepotism! When will the old girl stop? I believe I can sit out this particular royal directive. She can’t have that long to go, can she?’
Victoria’s fortitude was evident in March when she took a trip to Ireland, her first in 40 years. En route from Windsor to Woolwich she detoured via London. Perhaps this was for one last cheer from her subjects, or just to demonstrate that while now mainly wheelchair bound, she was still in charge, if not of an empire, then herself at 80.Victoria received a rapturous and positive response in the capital, verifying she was still the member of the royal family who counted most in the land. Biographer Stanley Weintraub said she had chosen ‘symbolism over invalidism’. It was also a triumph of her will over her woes. On the way to Woolwich she stopped at a military hospital, a naval school for boys and a crippled children’s home. It was obvious to all onlookers that this near-deaf, near-blind diminutive octogenarian was struggling but she showed concern for others at every stop. Her determination was an inspiration to all she met.
Courage, it seemed, was genetic. Bertie was in Brussels on his way with his wife to her family in Copenhagen. At 5.30 p.m. on 4 April 1900, just as his mother stepped foot in Ireland, he was on a train leaving Brussels. He and Alix looked out the train window as it began moving. A figure was on the footboard a few paces away aiming a gun at them through the window. The train jolted just as he fired. Two bullets flew between the royal couple’s heads instead of into them. The would-be assassin took aim again but was pulled from the footboard and set upon by brave Belgian travellers. Sixteen-year-old apprentice tinsmith Jean-Baptiste Sipido was arrested. Alix was upset; Bertie was stoic. He had the presence of mind to telegraph Alice Keppel, his number-one paramour, letting her know he and Alix were unharmed before the news hit London in the morning papers. Relieved to be alive, Bertie was magnanimous. He asked Belgian authorities to be lenient with the youth, whom he assumed was mentally unstable. Whatever the youth’s level of sanity, Bertie wrote to his sister Louise saying that the assailant was fortunately a very bad shot.
Victoria was informed. She mused on her own near-assassination misses and may well have believed there had been divine intervention for her family’s sake yet again. Other than that, the attackers were all poor marksmen.
Sipido’s Belgian trial was a farce. The accused was sorry he missed, blaming Bertie for the deaths of thousands of Boers in South Africa. His juvenile response had resonance in Europe where the British were criticised for their conduct of the war. It was enough for a Belgian jury to find him ‘not guilty’. He admitted he tried to kill two people. At best this was attempted murder, but the anti-British mood and emotion held sway over any rational response. Sipido was set free and this sent shock waves through the palaces. The royal family worried they would now be targets for more political fringe-dwellers with grievances, real and imagined. Soon after the incident, the kaiser expressed his sympathy to Bertie over Belgian indifference. Bertie doubted his nephew’s sincerity, especially when in Copenhagen he read in a French paper that the Germans were plotting with the French and Russians to join a coalition against the British. The rewards for a joint action would be colonial acquisitions in Egypt and India.
Bertie avoided Paris, a rare thing for him, where Anglophobia had peaked. On arriving in London at Charing Cross Station, he was greeted by cheering crowds. Thousands more demonstrated their support and approval as he took his carriage home to Marlborough House. Nothing, it seemed, lifted a public figure’s popularity like an assassination attempt. In British minds, justice had not been done over the would-be killer and support for Bertie was enhanced.
Vicky’s cancer spread and by the autumn of 1900 had reached her spine. She was given six months to live. Mother and daughter continued their correspondence, which became frenetic and impassioned in the knowledge that they were both too ill to travel; they would never see each other again. As ever, their correspondence gave each other strength.Vicky did not mention the ‘problem’ she saw arising over their many boxes of letters neatly marked and sitting in the attic of her home at Friedrichshof. She did not wish to worry her mother but, in a letter, she again urged Bertie to act before her own death, reminding him that Willy must never be allowed to get his hands on the correspondence. She worried that, because Willy deluded himself he was Victoria’s favourite, there was no telling what his reaction would be if he knew that she despised him, as everyone else did.
Bertie wrote back promising once more to visit her and have the letters removed for safekeeping back to Windsor Castle.
In the last months of 1900, at Osborne, Victoria struggled to do her duties as she had done for most of her more than 63 years as monarch: reading the ‘boxes’, signing papers, dictating letters and writing her journal. She had trouble keeping up her own entries or scribbling, partly from blindness, mainly from the effort. It was easier to mumble sentences to her secretary. Dramas within her mighty family seemed to multiply. Earlier, in July 1900, she had been inconsolable over the death from throat cancer of her 56-year-old son Alfred, Duke of Coburg, and six months later she was worrying daily about Vicky’s condition. Sad information would depress her. Sicknesses, divorce threats, scandal and any other alarms did not now reach Victoria.These omissions, or ‘edits’, concerning her relatives’ lives did not fool her, but she was too listless to make enquiries. It wasn’t that she did not care. Over the decades her diaries had demonstrated a constant worry and concern over her children and grandchildren, and all her in-laws.The weather on the Isle of Wight caused enough grey moments without augmentation from the pressures of her all-encompassing life, as mother, queen, emperor, friend, symbol of an empire and human being.
Victoria was fading away, although she was not prepared to accept it. She would ask her doctor, ‘Am I getting better?’ The response would always be positive. She wanted to
live. Dr Reid knew this and did not wish to discourage her passion for her life and grand position.Victoria loved being queen and empress. In the last few years she could always make excuses for not letting Bertie have important responsibilities, but they were never the point.Victoria had known no other life since she was eighteen. She could never contemplate abdicating to be dumped in a castle or house to see out her final years, out of sight, perhaps even out of the public mind. Victoria knew that her son was popular and capable, despite his deficiencies, in her eyes, of doubtful company and extravagant lifestyle. He would be a king to fit more profligate, perhaps frivolous times when so much rapid change, mainly technological, was upon the world.Victoria never seriously considered anything but going on to the end and dying in ‘office’. That way she knew the world, and not just her extended family, would focus on her to her last breath and beyond to a grand funeral she had planned to the last musical and written note. But remaining monarch when she was not fit for the role took a huge toll as ‘the ‘horrible year’ of 1900 stormed to an end of wind and rain.Victoria blamed the weather for not being able to see. It was dark and grey every day; Reid told her that she may have been right but it was her way of denying her diminishing senses. She went to bed earlier and was too fatigued to rise before noon. Any work distressed her. The new year began and for the first time in her life of keeping a diary, she did not start with a resolution.
Victoria told her diary that she entered 1901 feeling weak and unwell and that this made her sad, yet she was as stoic as ever, telling her daughter that she expected her health to soon ‘improve’. But her deep care for life was missing. So was a diary entry on 14 January. Victoria had been most attentive to her writing since 1832 when she was twelve years old. Since then the only serious gap had been the three weeks in October 1835 when she was very ill under the most traumatic conditions.
Lord Roberts, British commander-in-chief in South Africa, was the last soldier she saw. Joseph Chamberlain was the last minister. On 15 January 1901, she was put in her pony-chaise, hoping for a ride with Marie of Coburg, her widowed daughter-in-law. But the rain was incessant. She never had that final ride. On 16 January there was a last order, showing her faculties were still with her, despite her now perpetual fatigue. Victoria had her ambassador in Berlin informed that he should not accept an honour from the kaiser, her least liked grandson,Wilhelm II.
On 17 January, Dr Reid knew she was in trouble. She found it difficult to express herself and had experienced minor strokes. It made her fret. She was confused. Reid summoned a heart specialist.The next day the Duke of Connaught, in Berlin, was informed of her condition.The kaiser heard about it too and invited himself to England to be with his grandmother at the expected end. On 19 January, Bertie rolled into Osborne. He hated the place, finding it bleak, boring and without the night-life he craved. Seeing his entourage arriving, locals knew that something serious was afoot. He ordered a bulletin of understatement, saying that the queen had not been in her usual health due to the ‘great strain’ on her powers over the past year. In the next 48 hours she would rally, slip and rally again. Bertie left. Gloom was an emotion he avoided. The kaiser came and stayed. He wanted to demonstrate something: perhaps loyalty, maybe a strange showmanship. But he was there and he had every right to be. He loved his grandmama and she was the most powerful figure in his life. But Victoria, when she was conscious, called not to him or Bertie or one of her daughters; she asked for her little Pomeranian dog,Turi. It was placed on her bed.Victoria noticed it and then lapsed into semi-consciousness. Turi disliked the lack of attention or elevation and jumped off.
Bertie returned. He went into his mother’s room. She recognised him and opened her arms to him, uttering her last word as they hugged: ‘Bertie!’
She once blamed Albert’s death on him, but that was forgotten. Bertie, a sentimental fellow, was touched. The Bishop of Winchester and the Vicar of Whittingham hovered in the room; the kaiser waited outside. For once, Wilhelm showed humility. It surprised everyone so much that he was granted a place at the deathbed. Again, for once, he seemed concerned about someone else other than himself. For the first and last time, he had all the family’s respect. The two clergymen tacitly now took charge. Death, or as they preferred, the transition of a life to somewhere else, was their business. They prayed aloud. Victoria lay unmoved through verses of many prayers.The bishop recited alone; then the vicar tried. They chanted together. There was not a flicker from the dying queen. Perhaps her mind had already departed. Then the bishop recalled John Henry Newman’s hymn ‘Lead, Kindly Light’, which had been Victoria’s favourite. She had first sung it as a fourteen-year-old in 1833 in the church at St James’s Palace about the time she first befriended Elphinstone.The bishop leaned over her, not reciting, not really singing, but chanting. He lightened his tone to almost song. There was still not even a twitch from the sunken cheeks of the 81-year-old Victoria. By the time he reached the last two lines of the third verse of four his voice was lilting.The bishop noticed that she seemed alert, listening:‘And with the morn those angel faces smile/Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile!’
Encouraged, he carried on through the last verse, which Victoria had said for most of her life were the most beautiful words of faith she had ever heard.As a vibrant young girl, she just liked the sound of them. As a dying octogenarian, she understood them:
Meantime, along the narrow, rugged path,
Thyself hast trod,
Lead, Saviour, lead me home in childlike faith,
To rest forever after earthly strife
In the calm light of everlasting life
Satisfied that he had reached her before the end of her ‘earthly strife’, the bishop moved aside with the vicar. It was 4 p.m. on 22 January 1901. Outside, darkness was falling along with a light drizzle. A bulletin, sounding much like a shipping report, went out to the world: ‘The Queen is slowly sinking.’
A member of the royal household leaned close to Bertie and wondered if the queen would be happy in heaven. He didn’t have any idea, but on reflection said that Victoria would have to walk behind the angels. Bertie didn’t think she would appreciate that.
Dr Reid and Wilhelm moved to either side of her and, sitting on the bed, supported her so that she did not slide below the pillows. They stayed there for another two-and-a-half hours, Wilhelm testing his one good arm in an awkward position. Her breath came quicker and shallower. Her face took on more the look of a death mask. The room shrunk as her children (with Vicky among the living missing) and many of her 37 grandchildren filled it. Then, in a bizarre ritual to hold her back from the brink, they began calling their names, perhaps in the hope that she would be teased into staying with her huge brood a little longer. But, if anything, it may have quickened her final bow and leave-taking. She hated death-bed scenes like this.Victoria had let Vicky know it eighteen years earlier when commenting on what she had been told about the end of 82-year-old Prince Charles of Prussia. ‘I think it very dreadful that everyone was there,’ she had written with indignation. ‘I shall insist it is never the case if I am dying. It is awful!’
But Victoria was not in a position to insist on anything ever again. At 6 p.m. her offspring stopped calling to her. At 6.30 p.m. the bishop, fittingly and usefully, claimed there was a ‘great change of look, and complete calmness’.
Victoria was dead.
44
FUNERAL FOR A CONNOISSEUR
Victoria had had a passion, even macabre obsession with death and funerals. She had had almost manic concern for the way those close to her, including a favourite dog, made their exit. She had enjoyed the melancholia surrounding burials and, if the departure was of someone important, the sheer pomp and show of it. The more operatic a funeral the better. Not surprisingly, this fascination had led to fastidious planning for her own end. She had wished it to be the best she ever attended, beginning with what was to go on the one-way journey with her inside the coffin. Once the room had been cleared of her weeping re
latives, it was Dr Reid’s turn to take over from the clergy in organising her after-life as much as was possible. On instructions, her dressers moved in with a prepared list of items to be placed in the coffin with her. They included Albert’s dressing gown and one of his cloaks that had been embroidered by Princess Alice.There was also the plaster cast of his hand that Victoria had clasped in bed for most of four decades. Photos were placed neatly in several positions. Her lace wedding veil was put around her. A photo of John Brown was inserted between the fingers of her left hand, along with a lock of his hair. Finally she was adorned with rings, chains, bracelets and lockets. Each one had a story, including several relating to Elphinstone and Abdul Karim, from India, the country she never saw.The artefacts from them were not to be seen by the family. Reid, obeying this dictum, placed a bunch of flowers over the hand holding Brown’s photograph and other items.The doctor cut locks from Victoria’s hair for those among the family who wanted them. He then invited the mourners back into the room.
Bertie, now king and showing grace through metaphorically gritted teeth, asked Karim, now a portly 36-year-old, to enter so that he could pay his last respects, which was part of her direction in her last show on a grand stage. Once Karim had stepped away, Bertie signalled for the coffin lid to be closed and it was then draped in a white satin pall. An honour guard of sailors marched in and carried it, festooned with flowers, to the dining room where it would be protected for a week by four of her Grenadier guardsmen. Victoria’s diamond-studded crown sat on a velvet cushion on the coffin. A big Union Jack hung from the ceiling and huge candles flickered.The kaiser seemed overwhelmed by the exquisite scene and he wanted something to remind him of the occasion. He asked for the flag. Bertie, in a generous mood with another person he despised, agreed he could have it.