Victoria

by Julia Baird

  Victoria bore one child after another without ever ceasing her work. She vowed to try to make herself a better person for her husband. But her attitudes toward her job, her children, and the havoc motherhood wreaked on her body oscillated. She was robust yet constantly exhausted, adoring yet often resentful of Albert, proud of her family yet increasingly aggrieved by the sacrifices required of her. Victoria’s power and triumph as a monarch rested on her ordinariness as a mother and her obvious contentment as a wife. She was the Domestic Queen, and she was worshipped for it. But all the while, a sense of the injustice of the lot of women—which she would not express in words until she was a grandmother—took root and bloomed in her heart.

  The worst part was the physical toll. The wear on Victoria’s body is apparent in her private, growing distaste for the physical part of child-rearing; she did not write of pain, discomfort, or damage to her body in her journal, but being pregnant, she said, made her feel like an animal.

  Victoria had a “totally unsurmountable disgust” for breastfeeding. She was incensed when her daughter Alice decided to nurse her children herself, later in life, and a heifer in the Balmoral dairy was soon named Princess Alice. Victoria viewed it as vulgar, and inappropriate for upper-class women. She also believed it was incompatible with performing public duties, perhaps a persuasive argument in the days before breast pumps existed. Until commercial baby foods became widespread in the 1860s, most women in the Victorian middle class, and even aristocrats, combined breastfeeding with animal milk or mashed foods until the baby was a few months old. Wet nurses were expensive and frequently suspected of somehow corrupting their charges with dubious morals. But Victoria did not hesitate to employ them, believing it better for the child if a woman who was less refined and “more like an animal” suckled them. She summoned her eldest son’s first wet nurse, Mary Ann Brough, from the Isle of Wight to suckle the Prince of Wales when she was still in labor.*2

  For all her privilege, the queen shared with other women a complete lack of control over the messy, often debilitating process of bearing children. Eight in ten women gave birth less than a year after their weddings, just like Victoria. Most Englishwomen at the time were carrying or nursing babies for an average of twelve years: in total, Victoria spent sixteen. Yet Victoria produced almost double the era average of 5.5 children. Many historians have glossed over this achievement, ignoring the physical and emotional toll it took, the helplessness it engendered. She told her daughter that childbearing was “a complete violence to all one’s feelings of propriety (which God knows receive a shock enough in marriage alone).”

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  Victoria’s greatest comfort in the early child-rearing years was Albert. Her husband was far more involved in the lives of his children, and sufferings of his wife, than the average Victorian male. He was entirely comfortable in the nursery. He also “superintended the principles” of his children’s upbringing, which were, he wrote in 1846, “difficult to uphold in the face of so many women.” The Prince Consort was with Victoria during her births, carried her through her confinements, and humanely ended the practice of having a dozen men of state present in the next room as the queen gave birth. He was similarly tender with his children. Lady Lyttelton wrote of a nurse struggling in vain to get a glove on the tiny hand of the Prince of Wales—the boy was then two and a half years old—and finally throwing it away in frustration. She wrote:

  It was pretty to see [Albert] just coax the child on to his own knee, and put it on, without a moment’s delay, by his great dexterity and gentle manner; the Princey, quite evidently glad to be so helped, looking up very softly at his father’s beautiful face. It was a picture of a nursery scene. I could not help saying: “It is not every Papa who would have the patience and kindness,” and got such a flashing look of gratitude from the Queen!

  As the children grew, Albert was a figure of fun, instruction, and care in their lives: ordering the nursery, proudly showing the babies to visitors, organizing the christenings, planning their lessons, building cottages and forts, taking them to the theater, to the zoo, and to see Madame Tussaud’s waxworks. Victoria describes him noisily and eagerly flying a kite with his two elder sons, playing hide-and-seek with Vicky and Bertie, showing Bertie how to turn somersaults in piles of hay. The sight of him giving the children rides on his back and pulling them along the floor in a large basket delighted her. She wrote: “He is so kind to them and romps with them so delightfully, and manages them so beautifully and firmly.” He jiggled a child on each knee while playing silly songs on the organ.

  In 1859, Victoria told her firstborn, the eighteen-year-old Vicky, that Albert took the care of his family very seriously: “Papa says that the men who leave all home affairs—and the education of their children to their wives—forget their first duties.” Victoria blamed bad parenting for the wasted lives of her uncles: “It seems that George III cared very little for his children.” For many years, Albert taught the children for an hour a day himself. He also carefully monitored their security, after receiving threatening letters of “the most horrid kind” aimed at the children, in the years when Victoria was shot at regularly. He always kept a key to the children’s apartments in his pocket and ensured that they were formidably fortified with “intricate turns and locks and guardrooms, and various intense precautions.”

  For Victoria, dailiness was an important part of parenting. She visited her infants every day in the nursery and showed them off proudly. Even her ladies-in-waiting commented on how many hours she spent with her babies. In an 1844 memorandum on education, Victoria stated that children should be “as much as possible with their parents, and learn to place their greatest confidence in them in all things.” She read and prayed with her sons and daughters, and taught them about the Bible: the faith she wanted them to learn was one of kindness, tolerance, and love, not “fear and trembling.” Reports on her children appeared almost daily in Victoria’s journal: picking primroses, violets, and anemones in the woods near Osborne, hunting for Easter eggs, watching sheep being washed at the farm, laughing at the clowns at the circus, romping in her dressing room when she was disrobing, visiting the wild bears at the zoo, and digging potatoes in the gardens. On her wedding anniversary in 1852, Victoria wrote gratefully that while children were “often a source of anxiety and difficulty,” they were “a great blessing and cheer & brighten up life.”

  When their eldest son, the Prince of Wales, was still an infant, Victoria and Albert began concentrating on his education, an important task for a future king. He was a willful child who had hurricanelike tantrums as a toddler just like his mother—they exhausted him so much that afterward he lay on the floor as though asleep with his eyes open. They were inevitably disappointed with Bertie, who hated learning, was never destined to be a scholar, and whose progress was always compared unfavorably with that of his precocious older sister, Vicky. When he was five, the queen described him as “a very good child & not at all wanting in intellect.” Just a year later, she said he was “more backward” than his sister. (Greville said bluntly that the queen thought he was stupid.) When he was eight, his parents asked a phrenologist to examine his skull. The findings confirmed their fears: an “inaptitude for mental labour, and an aversion to it at particular times; and that…the organs of Combativeness, Destructiveness and Firmness [were] all large. The intellectual organs are only moderately developed.” Bertie’s affectionate, sociable nature was unfortunately overlooked in the drive for academic accomplishment. It was never going to be easy being the son of a man like Albert.

  By the end of the 1840s, foreigners landing in London were struck by the fervor of the people’s love for Victoria. As the Reverend D. Newell stood waiting for the queen to arrive at a public dedication for Lincoln’s Inn, which housed a barrister’s guild, he saw a “tide of human beings flow from all directions” to see the queen. It was impossible to get a glimpse, he said, but “the occasion was not lost to us, since, in the midst of this mighty confluence of Brit
ons, we could, in a sense see and feel the strong pulsations of a nation’s heart.” Victoria credited her family for this. In October 1844, she wrote to Leopold: “They say no sovereign was ever more loved than I am (I am bold enough to say), & this because of our domestic home, the good example it presents.” The queen was acutely aware of her symbolic power and understood her people with a canny intuition. Victoria represented a sweet, simple home life rather than idle excess, and this would help to inoculate the English monarchy from the revolutions that gripped Europe in the coming years, as other countries rose up against the idle excess of their monarchies.

  For as Victoria and Albert gamboled at Osborne and trekked the green hills of Scotland, clouds of dissent were gathering over the Continent. In a room in Brussels in 1848, two men named Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were producing The Communist Manifesto, urging the working class to “arise ye starvelings from your slumbers.” As Buckingham Palace was being enlarged and beautified, European royalty were pushed off their thrones. While Albert was surveying with pleasure his own tranquil abodes, angry hordes swarmed through palaces in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Prague, and Budapest. In May 1848, he wrote to Stockmar smugly from Buckingham Palace: “All is well with us, and the throne has never stood higher in England than at this moment.”

  * * *

  *1 It should be noted that while Michael Hunter, the curator of Osborne House, says that “the arrangement of the composition is rather suggestive,” he also points out that the painting has been restored in the past; “it would be interesting to ascertain—by X-ray examination—to what degree it has been overpainted by a restorer.” Correspondence with the author, February 12, 2015.

  *2 Thirteen years later, Mrs. Brough slaughtered her own six children in their beds, cutting their throats before unsuccessfully trying to slit her own. She was found to be insane. Reports trumpeted the fact that she had once nursed the Prince of Wales; Victoria and Albert, who were then already worried about Bertie’s mental capacity and glum disposition, read these reports nervously. (“The Murders at Esher Coroner’s Inquest, Esher, Monday Night,” The Times, June 13, 1854, 12, column C.)

  CHAPTER 16

  Annus Mirabilis: The Revolutionary Year

  The uncertainty everywhere, as well as for the future of our children, unarmed me & I quite gave way to my grief….I feel grown 20 years older, & as if I could not any more think of any amusement. I tremble at the thought of what may possibly await us here though I know how loyal the people at large are.

  —QUEEN VICTORIA, APRIL 3, 1848

  The man known as the Citizen King of France stared in the mirror as he slowly slid a razor down his cheeks. His wife, sitting behind him, smiled for the first time in days as her husband’s bare face emerged from the auburn whiskers that had framed it for many years; he looked suddenly shy, and exposed, like a child. Louis Philippe had been shorn of his crown just a few days earlier, at the age of seventy-four. After eighteen years on the throne, he was forced to abdicate in favor of his nine-year-old grandson during a bloody revolution that saw the streets of Paris burn. He and his wife, Marie-Amelie, had fled for safety. They had not slept for many days. Louis Philippe patted his pocket, making sure for the hundredth time that the falsified “Mr. and Mrs. William Smith” identification papers were safe. They left the house in Paris, traveled by boat to Le Havre on the coast, and, in the black of night, boarded a waiting steamship. All they had with them on the journey to England was a tiny suitcase and the clothes they were wearing. Their escape was close: just two hours after they left, police came to the house they had been hiding in to try to arrest the king.

  In the preceding years, the gulf between rich and poor in France had widened; the working classes toiled in intolerable conditions, and the cost of living spiraled. The once-loved King Louis Philippe had become increasingly unpopular. When the government outlawed a series of banquets organized to raise funds to support opposition, thousands gathered on the streets to protest. On February 22, 1848, fifty-two people were killed during violent riots. As an angry rabble streamed to his palace, the king, surrounded by panicked advisers, decided to abdicate. Dozens of family members made their way in clusters of two and three, in carriages, trains, boats, and on foot, with their nurses, maids, and courtiers, to England; in France, the revolutionaries drank and danced in the palace, raiding the royal closets. Among the king’s offspring traveling to England were Albert’s cousin Augustus and his wife, Clementine (the third surviving daughter of Louis Philippe), and Victoire of Saxe-Coburg-Kohary, a close cousin of Victoria, who was married to the eldest surviving child of the deposed king and queen of France. When Louis Philippe stepped from the steamship onto the safety of British shores, wearing the captain’s overcoat and concealing his eyes with enormous goggles, he almost wept with relief.

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  Victoria took in her royal friends, but she disapproved of their capitulation. She thought the king should have stayed to fight. Giving up was not just cowardly, she believed, but unnecessary. The twenty-eight-year-old Victoria, belly swollen with her sixth child, had nerves of iron. She wrote repeatedly in her diary over the next few months that she thought the king of France had made a mistake.

  Another tender point was that Louis Philippe had double-crossed Victoria only two years earlier. The French king and British queen had initially enjoyed a period of warm relations, partly because his eldest daughter, Louise, had married Victoria’s uncle Leopold and had always been kind to the younger British queen. In 1843, Victoria became the first British monarch to visit a French counterpart in more than three hundred years. She was taken with the beauty of their castle at Eu and the ease of their manners. Queen Marie-Amelie told Victoria that she thought of her as a daughter. But one thing the royals did not discuss during the visit was the sensitive subject of Spain. Louis Philippe had long dreamed of aligning his country with Spain and had quietly arranged for one of his sons to marry the Infanta Luisa, the younger sister of the thirteen-year-old Queen Isabella, who ruled Spain with her mother as regent. Louis Philippe had concocted a complicated plot. He hoped that Queen Isabella would marry her cousin the Duke of Cadiz, who was thought to be either gay or infertile, and leave no heirs, so that the Infanta Luisa could marry the Duke of Montpensier, his son, and produce an heir with him.

  Victoria, though, wanted Queen Isabella to marry a Coburg cousin. After protracted intrigue, during Victoria and Albert’s second visit to Eu in 1845, the English and French foreign ministers agreed that neither of them would present a suitor for the Infanta Luisa until her elder sister had children. This agreement evaporated in 1846 when Lord Palmerston foolishly showed the French ambassador a dispatch that said a cousin of Victoria’s was a candidate for Queen Isabella’s hand. In a snap, the two girls were engaged to the Duke of Cadiz and the Duke of Montpensier. An “extremely indignant” Victoria told Queen Marie-Amelie that her husband had breached a promise. The tensions endured for almost two years, until the protests in Paris began.

  Victoria quickly forgot her grudge. She was genuinely appalled at the uprisings, and despite past intrigues she still loved her French family. “Humbled poor people they looked,” she wrote on March 7, the day after she greeted Louis Philippe and Marie-Amelie at Buckingham Palace. Victoria, who was then heavily pregnant, sent clothes for the refugees and lent them her uncle Leopold’s grand estate, Claremont, to stay in for as long as they needed. Augustus and Clementine and their children lived with her in Buckingham Palace. Clem, who was pregnant with her fourth child, was the same age as Victoria, and the two women grew close as they tried to fathom the events of the past month. Victoria was distressed to hear that Louis Philippe’s daughter-in-law Helene, the mother of the next king, had had her children torn from her in the melee: “What could be more dreadful!”

  Anxiety and sadness radiated through the palace. “Poor Clem,” Victoria wrote in her journal, “says she can get no sleep, constantly seeing before her those horrible faces and hearing those dreadful cries and shri
eks.” She spent months worrying about her guests. She fretted when they grew too thin, and described her cousin Victoire as looking “like a crushed rose.”

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  The European revolutions of 1848, called the “Springtime of the Peoples,” started in Sicily in January, spread to France in February, and quickly spread across Europe. The most violent uprisings occurred in Poland, the Austrian Empire, Germany, and Italy as well as France. The reasons were disparate and mostly unconnected, but in many countries it was the eruption of the working and middle classes—grouped in unusual and temporary coalitions—after decades of exponential change. They had endured a rise in basic living costs, crop failures, crowded cities, parliaments run by the idle and apathetic rich, and repressive monarchs. The voices of dissent grew louder and louder as they debated ideal forms of democracy, socialism, incremental liberalism, and republicanism.

  As the rebellion spread, Victoria’s attitude swung from fear to horror. This kind of chaos was anathema to a monarch. In her diary, she referred to the revolutionaries as a “mob of bloodthirsty ruffians,” “the dreadful rabble,” and “people [who] are going on in a disgusting way.” The queen did not like hordes, nor did she like the French. This was clear in her correspondence. When Arthur Benson and Lord Esher edited her letters for posthumous publication, they censored her harshest anti-French views to avoid embarrassing her son, King Edward VII, about an ally. The original letters, in the Royal Archives, reveal her secret desire for the French citizenry to be punished for rebelling. A letter she wrote to Leopold in April 1848 reads: “In France, really great things go on dreadfully, & for the sake of morality there ought to be some great catastrophe at Paris for that is the hothouse of Iniquity from wherein all the mischief comes.” While she privately believed that Louise Philippe should not have abdicated, she wrote: “The recollection of Louis XVI and the wickedness and savageness of the French mob is enough to justify all and everybody will admit that.” (The words in italics were later deleted by Benson and Esher.)