Victoria

by Julia Baird

  The Windsor Castle librarian, Owen Morshead, apologized to Sir Alan Lascelles, the Keeper of the Royal Archives, for having inadvertently sent “inflammable material” (“I know that the Prince and the Queen did not always agree during their early married years,” he wrote matter-of-factly, “but I suspected no revelations within these particular covers”). The book was returned to Beatrice, and she quickly burned it.

  In the following year, 1944, Beatrice died. What she had not been told was that before returning them to her, someone had taken photographs of these documents and slid them carefully into a section of the Royal Archives. They remain buried there today, piled neatly in a little white box tied up with ribbon. Why this happened is unclear. Was it the librarian who rebelled against orders and did not get caught? Or was it the order of the king to humor the old lady but preserve the evidence of his great-grandmother’s marital conflicts? We know that George V and Queen Mary had been frustrated when watching Beatrice destroying her mother’s private papers and disinfecting the remaining records. As some glimpses of Victoria’s original diary still exist in the work of Theodore Martin, whom Victoria had commissioned to write a biography of Albert, it is clear that Beatrice made her mother tamer, less emotional, and more sensible in her rewriting.

  The editors of Victoria’s letters similarly warped the historical record. As Yvonne Ward has so adeptly demonstrated, Arthur Benson and Lord Esher, the two men entrusted with the task of culling and editing Victoria’s correspondence, presented a skewed version of the queen. There were obvious trims—removal of too sharp a criticism of the French, or of her children, or deletion of words such as “vulgar” to sanitize her language—but further, “knowledge and particularly sharp or terse opinions which the Queen held were downplayed so that she might seem feminine and innocent. Her correspondence with women was omitted in order to avoid triviality. Her European correspondence was minimized to moderate any perception of foreign influences upon her.” They cut any words that might have made Victoria seem “excessively assertive, unfeminine or insulting” as well as politically biased. Even worse, men wrote most of the letters in her official volumes; only four of every ten letters were in the queen’s hand. Benson and Esher also cut out most letters to other women and references to her children, so Victoria’s female friendships were scrubbed out, and her maternal confidences gone.

  The photographs taken of the documents Beatrice destroyed during World War II—which are cited later in this book—are rare gems that provide insight into the intimate relationship between Victoria and Albert, in which he called her “child” and told her how to behave. But this correspondence also illuminates the extraordinary difficulty of trying to capture the mind and heart of a queen when her words were crafted, then rewritten, cut, concealed, and destroyed. It has been conservatively estimated that Victoria wrote an average of two and a half thousand words per day during her reign, a total of approximately sixty million words. Yet much of this material has been polished or glossed over or has vanished. Countless reams have been burned by her family, especially any correspondence relating to her Scottish intimate, John Brown, her Indian servant, Adbul Karim, and her most shameful episode as a young queen—the bullying of Lady Flora Hastings.

  Queen Victoria remains buried under a mountain of myths, created by observers, sycophants, monarchists, republicans, and herself, and bolstered by the royal family ever since. Myths such as that when Albert died, she died too. That she loathed her children. That she was an impeccably constitutional, well-behaved queen. That she disliked power, lacked ambition, and loved only the domestic. That she was a simple product of the men who advised and shaped her, like a walking, talking Galatea. And, of course, that her servant John Brown was just a good friend. Then there are the myths of her own creation: that Albert was flawless and their marriage spotless. That he was king, and she only his supplicant shadow. All of this is nonsense.

  —

  Oscar Wilde believed that the three great personalities of the nineteenth century were Napoleon Bonaparte, Victor Hugo, and Queen Victoria. He described her as “a ruby mounted in jet”—a majestic more than a flattering image. She was indeed a great personality—but Victoria was also caustic and selfish, often dismissive, prone to self-pity, and obstinate. Millions died of starvation and disease during her reign, but she seemed blind to their plight. She was demanding, and rude to people she did not like. She despised elites, censured members of the House of Lords for hunting, drinking, and carousing all day, looked down on members of society who were idle and oversexed, often failed to support important reforms if she personally disliked their advocates, and frequently fled public duties for the peace and solitude of Scotland.

  Victoria was acutely conscious of her flaws. Her dress was considered gauche, she was always fatter than she would have liked, and she surrounded herself with beauty out of a desire to compensate for her own lack of it. But she loved fiercely, was kind and truthful, had a keen sense of justice, despised racial and religious prejudice, and formed attachments to her servants that were so strong they were considered peculiar and even suspect. She also survived eight assassination attempts. By the end of her reign, Queen Victoria’s prestige was phenomenal. Americans declared her the wisest woman in the world. Old women believed her touch would heal them, old men reported they could see more clearly after she visited them, and a seventy-six-year-old African American woman saved money for fifty years before traveling from the United States to talk to her for a few minutes.

  The queen was born at a time of immense upheaval—the sleepy village that surrounded Kensington Palace would become a bustling metropolis by the end of her lifetime, with chimneys billowing smoke that clouded the sun, row houses crammed with five families per room, rivers clogged with sewage, and ships proudly sailing across the world to plant British flags on foreign continents. Uprisings would rattle the Church, the aristocracy, and Parliament. Under her reign, Britain would achieve a greatness it had not known before. This queen would rule a quarter of the people on earth, an epoch would be named after her, and her stern profile would forever be associated with a paradoxical time of growth, might, exploitation, poverty, and democracy.

  Victoria was the most powerful queen, and the most famous working mother, on the planet. When we allow her to remain—as she has done in public memory for so long—submerged in her black piles of mourning, we forget that Victoria had been fighting for her independence, her prestige, and the honor of the Crown since she was a teenager, and did so successfully and in large part alone. We also forget that she fought for an empire and values she believed in and worked until her eyes wore out, that she advised, and argued with, ten prime ministers, populated the royal courts of Europe, and kept the British monarchy stable during the political upheavals that shook Europe in the nineteenth century. We forget that she loved again, that she giggled when grandchildren played at her feet, that she helped avoid a war with the United States, that she leapt upon opportunities to fire or anoint prime ministers. We forget that suffrage expansion and antipoverty and antislavery movements in the British Empire can all be traced to her monumental reign, along with a profound rethinking of family life and the rise of religious doubt. When she died, in 1901, she was the longest-reigning monarch in English history, and she remained so until 2015, when her great-great-granddaughter Elizabeth broke Victoria’s record.

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  Victoria’s legacy was enormous: a century, an empire, nine children, forty-two grandchildren. Today, outside Windsor Castle, amid ice cream stores and cluttered souvenir stalls, a statue of a portly woman stands in the middle of the road, unsmiling, looking over their heads to the distant horizon. The castle was built by William the Conqueror in the eleventh century and remodeled by a series of kings, including Charles II and George IV; Victoria found it large, gloomy, and “prison-like,” but she is the monarch who shields it today. It is a mother who is the custodian of this castle, and who safeguarded the British people as they took firm steps towar
d democracy in a century roiling with ferment. It is a mother, who followed her husband from room to room while they fought, storming and crying, and who struggled to reconcile her innate resolve with her lack of self-esteem. It is an ordinary woman who was thrust into an extraordinary role.

  Victoria grappled with many of the matters women do today—managing uneven relationships, placating resentful spouses, trying to raise decent children, battling bouts of insecurity and depression, spending years recovering from childbirth, yearning for a lost love, sinking into the strength of another when we want to hide from the world, longing to make independent decisions about our own lives and to shape the world we live in. She lusted after and fought for power at a time when women had none. Victoria’s story is one of unmatched prestige and immense privilege, of defiance and crumbling, of meddling and mettle, of devotion and overwhelming grief and then, finally, a powerful resilience that defined the tiny woman at the heart of an empire. It is, above all, a surprising story of strength. What we have truly forgotten today is that Victoria is the woman under whose auspices the modern world was made.

  Julia Baird

  Shelley Beach

  October 2015

  CHAPTER 1

  The Birth of “Pocket Hercules”

  My brothers are not so strong as I am….I shall outlive them all; the crown will come to me and my children.

  —EDWARD, DUKE OF KENT,

  FATHER OF QUEEN VICTORIA

  Queen Victoria was born, roaring, at 4:15 A.M., in the hour before dawn on May 24, 1819. In those first few seconds, she was like any newborn: naked, vulnerable, and wondering, wriggling in her mother’s arms. Her spell of innocence would be brief. In moments, the most important men in the land—clergymen, chancellors, warriors, and politicians—would crowd into the room, pressing ruddy faces close to the baby girl who did not yet have a name. Within two decades, all of the men present at her birth who were still alive would be bowing to her as queen—something few could have guessed when she was born, as she was merely fifth in line to the throne. But this was an important child—one who would go on to command armies, select archbishops, and appoint prime ministers. From this moment, she would never be alone; an adult shadowed every step she took, tasted every mouthful of food, and overheard every conversation.

  As the sky lightened, her mother, the Duchess of Kent, lay back on the pillows of her four-poster bed and closed her eyes, exhausted, breathing in the lilacs and mayflowers in the gardens below. On this cloudy spring morning, a light rain was falling, bringing relief after three weeks of intense heat. The room in Kensington Palace in which the baby was born was entirely white and smelled of lush new carpet. Outside the windows, sheep grazed and jays sang among the beech trees.

  As was the custom in royal households, the men of the Privy Council had been summoned from dinner parties, the theater, and bed the night before. As the duchess lay writhing and breathing through contractions, His Majesty’s ministers waited in an adjoining room. The duke had forewarned them that he would not entertain them, as he planned to stay next to his wife, urging her on. As tradition dictated, these high-ranking men listened to the cries of the duchess during the six-hour labor, then crowded the room once the baby arrived, to attest that it was in fact the mother’s child. (In 1688, when Mary of Modena, the Catholic wife of James II, gave birth to a thriving boy, a majority of the public—fueled by Protestants unhappy at the thought of a healthy male heir—believed that she had in fact miscarried and that she had had another, live baby smuggled into her room in a warming pan. This was untrue, but it was one of the factors leading to the revolution that knocked James II off the throne.)

  The duchess endured the presence of the men, who signed the birth certificate and a report of the baby’s “perfectly healthful appearance.” They murmured congratulations, then shuffled wearily back out into a city that was slowly waking; grooms in stables were fetching water, the scent of beeswax wafted from the nearby candle manufactory. Breakfast sellers were setting up stalls along the Great West Road, an old Roman highway that ran alongside Hyde Park and was the main route into London from the southwest. Workers hurried to factories through the mist among rattling mail coaches and market carts, and past thousands of weary cattle being herded to their slaughter.

  Back in Kensington Palace, the Duke of Kent was restless with pride and excitement. In letters to friends, he raved about his wife’s “patience and sweetness” during labor, and he praised the midwife, Frau Siebold, for her “activity, zeal and knowledge.” In a curious coincidence that shows how tight-knit the worlds of the British and German royals were at the time, just three months later, Frau Siebold was to preside at the birth of Victoria’s future husband, Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. The baby Albert, his mother cooed, was “superbe—d’une beauté extraordinaire.” From infancy, Albert was praised for his beauty, just as Victoria was praised for her strength.

  —

  At birth Victoria was only fifth in line to the throne. But in the years before, her father, Edward, Duke of Kent—the fourth son of King George III—had dramatically revised his life when he realized his siblings were not producing heirs and that the throne could someday pass to him and his offspring. He already had a partner, a gentle Frenchwoman named Julie de Saint-Laurent. Edward had ostensibly hired her to sing at a party with his band in 1790, during his first stint as governor in Gibraltar, but she was really brought into his house to share his bed. Despite these unromantic beginnings, and the fact that even if they had married, the king would never have recognized their union, they formed a remarkably successful partnership, which lasted through postings in Canada and Gibraltar as well as a scandalous mutiny by Edward’s troops.

  But despite the three decades he had spent with the devoted Julie de Saint-Laurent, Edward had come to decide he needed a legitimate wife, one who would enable him to pay off his substantial debts, as princes were given additional allowances when they wed. When his niece Charlotte, the presumptive heir to the throne, died in childbirth, it also became clear that if he found a younger wife, she might be able to bear a child who could reign over England.

  —

  When the Duke of Kent urged his carriage westward from Germany weeks before Victoria’s birth, he was trying to outrun the most unpredictable of rivals: biology. He wanted to get his heavily pregnant German wife to Britain in time to give birth to a baby he hoped might one day sit on the throne. The duke was certain any future monarch would be more loved if the baby bawled his or her first cry on England’s soil. He looked down at his wife’s pale face, lit by the gentle spring sun, and beamed. He was fifty-one and penniless: it was something of a miracle that he had found such a young, pretty, amiable wife. The thirty-two-year-old Princess Victoire of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, a tiny principality much diminished by Napoleon’s land grab in south Germany, was cheerful, short, and plump, with brown ringlets and apple-red cheeks. Recently widowed, Victoire had two children of her own, and had taken some persuading before agreeing to marry the Duke of Kent. But they had quickly settled into a fond companionship, and Victoire soon became pregnant.

  When he began the long journey from Amorbach to England, the duke was not just racing to Great Britain; he hoped he was racing to the throne. Just a year before, the thought that the Duke of Kent might have been able to produce an heir to the throne would have been laughable. He was then only a distant fifth in line, after his older brother George, the Prince Regent. Next in line after George was George’s only and much-loved child, Charlotte. Then, also ahead of the Duke of Kent were his other older brothers, Frederick and William. King George III, who was going mad, had fifteen children with his wife, Queen Charlotte, though only twelve were still alive. The seven remaining sons had precedence over their five sisters—and if any of the sons had children, the crown would pass down to their heirs, not to their siblings. (The British throne was until 2011 governed by male preference primogeniture, whereby the crown passed to the sons, in order of birth, before then being pas
sed to the daughters, in order of birth.)

  Charlotte, the only daughter of King George III’s eldest son, the Prince Regent who would become George IV, would ascend the throne after her father. Charlotte was a high-spirited, fetching young woman, who fell deeply in love with and married in 1816 the dashing Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. England cheered when she quickly became pregnant. But Charlotte hated feeling enormous—and constantly being told how big she was—and grew depressed. Her doctors put her on a strict diet in her final months, and drained blood from her. Many patients died from this dubious practice, the favored remedy for patients believed to have “bad humors,” especially those who were already malnourished and ailing.

  After a fifty-hour labor, Charlotte’s son emerged stillborn. She was exhausted and bled heavily. Doctors plied her with wine and brandy, and piled hot water bottles around her, but they were unable to save her; she died on November 6, 1817. (Her accoucheur, or male midwife, Richard Croft, was so distraught that three months later, while attending another prolonged labor, he picked up a gun and shot himself in the head). Grief for Charlotte, the hopeful future queen of England, hung like a pall over the streets of London for weeks. Soon there was a national shortage of black fabric.