by Julia Baird
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An inevitable part of being a queen at a time of national crisis is incongruity. As the violence and bloodshed continued in the Crimea, Victoria wrote about the moonlight on the sea, the snow, blooms, blue skies, and the “peculiar and soothing effect” of a sunny week at Osborne. As soldiers sailed for the East and shivered on hillsides without tents or warm clothes, Victoria was hunting for Easter eggs with the children, playing with stuffed mice, and hiding quietly in the heather as Albert hunted deer.
The children were all shooting upward, and the eldest, Vicky, had suddenly matured. In 1855, during the war, while the royal family was up at Balmoral, Frederick William, the only son of Prussia’s Emperor William I, asked Victoria and Albert if he could marry their accomplished, smart daughter, who was almost fifteen. They accepted gladly, making him—and the men of state they confided in—promise not to tell Vicky until she was confirmed a year later, aged sixteen. Victoria was thrilled, telling Leopold, “He is a dear, excellent, charming young man, whom we shall give our dear child to with perfect confidence. What pleases us greatly is to see that he is really delighted with Vicky.” She had been worried that her daughter was not pretty enough for her suitor. But her heart ached too; soon she would lose her beloved daughter to Prussia.
Victoria’s mother, the Duchess of Kent, was now a doting grandmother and a crucial part of the family, their estrangement long forgotten. Both mother and daughter looked back on the conflict caused by Conroy with regret. The duchess wrote to Victoria that the death of Conroy in 1854 grieved her: “[He] has been of great use to me, but unfortunately has also done great harm.” She went on to ask her daughter not to dwell on the past, when “passions of those who stood between us” had sparked mistrust. A wiser Victoria reassured her mother that those days were long gone.
Victoria constantly fretted that she might lose all her hard-won happiness. On her thirty-fourth birthday, in 1853, she wrote: “What blessings do I not enjoy! often I feel surprised at being so loved, & tremble at my great happiness, dreading that I may be too happy!” Osborne was “paradise,” with its nightingales, roses, and orange flowers. She was a woman staunchly, though nervously, content.
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The Crimean War was the only war involving more than two European powers between 1815 and 1914. It marked an interruption of the long peace that stretched from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the First World War. It had not taken long for Britain to realize they had little in common with their allies the Turks, who were running a largely corrupt, despotic empire; they soon abandoned their uneasy alliance with the French too. The two-and-a-half-year-long Crimean War would always be associated with official cluelessness, and it exposed the incompetence of the British parliamentary elite as well as the military. Florence Nightingale’s task was mammoth: it would take a nurse who pioneered the use of pie charts to demonstrate the folly of generals.
In the fall of 1855, the long-awaited news finally came: after a 349-day siege, Sevastopol had fallen to allied troops. Victoria and Albert walked up the hill of Craig Gowan after dinner and lit a bonfire (it had been built the year before, following false news that the fort had fallen). The gentlemen of the Scottish village, clad in nightgowns, boots, and jackets, came, along with servants, foresters, and workmen. As the queen watched the figures dance around the flames from below, firing guns into the blackness, drinking, and playing the pipes, her thoughts drifted, as always, to the soldiers. Many had died, many had returned maimed, and the pact agreed to at the war’s end did not score any major concessions for Britain, but the fighting was now over. After months of negotiating a treaty that only served to restrain Russia for a few years, the hefty weight of the war rolled from Victoria’s back. Albert returned from the bonfire and reported that it had been “wild & exciting beyond everything.”
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* Victoria did not mention the Jamaican-born nurse Mary Seacole, who worked in the Crimea running an army provision store—the much loved “British Hotel,” built from driftwood, at Balaclava—and tending to the ill, dressed in her brightly colored clothes, on the battlefields.
CHAPTER 19
Royal Parents and the Dragon of Dissatisfaction
A family on the throne is an interesting idea. It brings down the pride of sovereignty to the level of petty life.
—WALTER BAGEHOT, 1867
I go on working at my treadmill, as life seems to me.
—PRINCE ALBERT, AUGUST 6, 1861
For centuries, the jade-green river Thames had coursed through the heart of London, crowned by large flocks of swans and crowded with fish; it bustled with barges and sustained millions of livelihoods. The fetid sewage that accumulated on its riverbanks in the early nineteenth century also provided a decent living for those who could put up with the smell. So-called mud larks, usually children of seven or eight, collected rubbish from the river, roaming the banks and pipe ends with kettles and baskets dangling from their arms, hunting for pieces of coal or wood, copper nails, or any salable rubbish. Men crawled through sewers scavenging for anything useful: nails, rope, coins, bolts, cutlery, metals, or buttons. Henry Mayhew’s definitive midcentury account of London’s poor recounts “many wondrous tales” of men losing their way in the labyrinths flowing with sewage or of “sewer-hunters beset by myriads of enormous rats.” The work was filthy, but surprisingly lucrative.
A century earlier, the river named Tamesis by Caesar was clean. But when the water closet replaced the cesspool in the mid-1800s, channeling the city’s sewage to the river in large murky pipes, the water turned to black in less than half a century. At the same time, the capital’s population ballooned. In 1801, there were 136,000 houses in London. By 1851, there were 306,000. Those living near the river noticed an increasing acidity and murkiness in the water.
By the mid-1850s, eighty million gallons of human waste from more than three million Londoners was draining down the Thames each year. The problem seemed insurmountable. In 1852, the chief engineer of the Metropolitan Sewers Commission, Frank Forster, died, and his death was attributed to “harassing fatigues and anxieties of official duties.” The next year, a cholera epidemic raged through the city, killing almost twelve thousand. This finally convinced scientists that disease was not borne by foul air, but by water. Yet the government, crippled by inertia and lack of will and urgency, failed to act.
The royal family was insulated, but not exempt. Buckingham Palace often reeked of leaking excrement and crawled with rodents. Victoria watched her dogs chasing rats around her bedroom at Windsor, praising one for “valiantly” triumphing; “the rat made an awful noise, though he was killed right out pretty quickly.” Victoria employed a personal ratcatcher, Jack Black, who strode around corridors in blazing red topcoat, waistcoat, and breeches, wearing a belt set with cast-iron rats. When Victoria and Albert rode along the Thames in a barge, they grew sick from “the fearful smell!”
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By June 1858, the smell was so bad that lime was scattered in the river beneath the Houses of Parliament, and sheets soaked in bleach hung from ceilings inside so the gentlemen could speak without having to hold handkerchiefs over their noses. In the early summer, a long dry spell had dwindled the supply of fresh water coming from upland areas, and the water temperature was at a record high. A thick mass of black sewage stretched for eighteen miles. The resulting crisis became known as the Great Stink. Much of the city business ground to a halt; the courts rushed through cases to avoid prolonged exposure to the fumes. Charles Dickens wrote that the “most horrible” Thames had a “most head-and-stomach distracting nature.” Some Londoners spontaneously vomited when suddenly exposed to fumes. The stench was no respecter of class; all were affected. The country Victoria ruled was struggling to keep pace with the rapid modernization of the century; industry was flourishing, trade was expanding, and the Thames had become one of the busiest waterways in the empire. But the government was scrambling to ensure that the most basic of rights were provided to her subjects: cl
ean water, clean air, and sanitation.
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Victoria was more preoccupied with the world inside her palaces. Her ninth child, her beloved Beatrice, was born on April 14, 1857. Albert and the doctor again gave Victoria chloroform to numb the pain, which she found a “great relief.” Dr. Clark advised her that, given the wear on her physically, and the fact that she was almost thirty-eight, this should be her last baby. Worried that this might affect her intimacy with Albert, Victoria asked her doctor, “Can I have no more fun in bed?” During her ninth and final pregnancy, she had struggled with a bad cough and exhaustion, all while grieving the death of her half brother, Charles, a Bavarian soldier and politician. By the end, Albert told his brother that Victoria was “hardly able to do what is expected of her.” But the robust queen bounced back cheerfully from the grueling labor. Two months after the birth, Victoria was strong enough to dance all night. “I have felt better & stronger this time, than I have ever done before,” she wrote happily. “How I also thank God for granting us such a dear, pretty girl, which I so much wished for!” She named her Beatrice, she said, because it meant “blessed.” This baby girl would be an enormous comfort to her mother. After watching Beatrice gurgle and play in her bath, Victoria wrote: “A greater duck, you could not see & she is such a pet of her Papa’s, stroking his face with her 2 dear little hands.” Both parents were infatuated. Albert declared her “the most amusing baby we have had.”
Beatrice quickly flourished; she was a godsend, a child of grace. Victoria doted on babies over the age of four months, especially the fat ones. She wrote on Beatrice’s first birthday: “She is so engaging, & such a delight to kiss & fondle. If only she could remain, just as she is.”
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Less than a month after Beatrice was born, India erupted into a spontaneous, brutal mutiny. It was a war of independence fought on political grounds—the Indians rebelling against the rule of the British—and religious, the Hindus and Muslims against the Christians. The revolt followed a broadening of British influence in India. From 1848 to 1856, Lord Dalhousie, the governor-general of India, had introduced reforms, most controversially through the “doctrine of lapse” whereby he annexed land when the Indian ruler was “manifestly incompetent” or died without an obvious male Indian heir, in an attempt to bring the entire country under British control. He had also built infrastructure—railways, irrigation canals, telegraph lines, post offices, roads, and bridges—and increased the land owned by British India by more than a third, including the vast Punjab in the north. He centralized and westernized the public service and administrative branches of government, and he tried to clamp down on abhorrent local practices such as female infanticide and human sacrifice. Some changes—such as legalizing the remarriage of Hindu widows in 1856—were made too rapidly; that was seen as an assault on the Indians’ faith and way of life. The Indians knew their soldiers far outnumbered the British; five Indian soldiers to one British soldier was the common ratio.
The immediate cause of the rebellion was the introduction of the Enfield rifled musket in 1853. The cartridges used with this musket were smeared in pig and cow fat and were designed to be torn open with the teeth, which was offensive to both Muslim and Hindu soldiers (whose religions ban or discourage the eating of pork and beef). They feared they were going to be forcibly converted to Christianity by their British rulers. The cartridges were eventually replaced, assurances made about respect for religion, and an allowance made for soldiers to open cartridges with their fingers—although rumors persisted that the offending grease remained. The catalyst came on May 9, 1857, when eighty-five Indian men at Meerut station were sentenced to ten years in prison for refusing to load their guns. The next day, in reaction, three Indian regiments killed British officers and their wives. They then marched south to Delhi and butchered as many Europeans as they could (around fifty, at closest count).
As the mutiny spread, Victoria tried to goad the Cabinet into action. British troops were currently en route to Asia, to fight for greater recognition of British trade and diplomacy in the Second Opium War in China. They were instead diverted to India, delaying the Chinese war by a year. It was a brutal conflict; both sides committed atrocities. At Cawnpore, 350 Britons were under siege from 3,000 Indian mutineers for three weeks. A local prince who sided with the rebels offered the British safe passage down the River Ganges if they would abandon their entrenchment in Cawnpore. The British agreed, and they piled into rowboats moored at the river’s edge. Suddenly bugles sounded, the Indian oarsmen dived into the river, and the Indians fired cannons at the British group, killing nearly everyone. Saber-bearing Indian troops rode into the water to slice up any who had escaped the grapeshot. The 125 women and children who survived were imprisoned in a nearby villa and slaughtered a month later. The British arrived the day after the massacre and walked past wells piled with mutilated corpses. There were tiny red hand- and footprints on the walls of the huts and children’s shoes with the feet still in them. Reprisals were swift and savage. Before being led to the gallows by the British, mutineers were made to lick blood from the floor.
Victoria was sickened and unable to sleep, haunted by the thought of toddlers trapped in the villa. It made her “blood run cold.” She asked her former lady-in-waiting Lady Canning, now the wife of the governor of India, to let those “who have lost dear ones in so dreadful a manner know of my sympathy. A woman and above all a wife and mother can only too well enter into the agonies gone thro’ of the massacres.”
The British public bayed for revenge. The rebels were maimed, killed, stripped naked, and tortured for sport. One British unit drank and listened to a band while they watched hundreds of rebels hanged. When the enlightened Lord Canning, the governor of India, chastised his troops for this behavior, the press blew raspberries and clamored for bloody reprisals. Victoria offered support to Lord Canning, calling the vengeful cries “shameful.” While those responsible for the carnage should be punished, she said to him, “to the nation at large—to the peaceable inhabitants, to the many kind and friendly natives who have assisted us…these should be shown the greatest kindness. They should know there is no hatred to a brown skin—none, but the greatest wish on their Queen’s part to see them happy, contented and flourishing.”
In July1858 a peace treaty was signed. Parliament abolished the East India Company, which had governed most of India since 1601, and instead took direct responsibility for the governance of the country. Victoria promised legal protection for the religious belief and worship of her Indian subjects and insisted that all should be given jobs according to education and ability, not class or creed. Her views were enlightened when compared to the reports she had from British officials returning from India, who complained of Indians behaving “like animals.”
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In January 1858, in the last months of the mutiny, Vicky married her Prussian prince, Fritz. Albert had approved of the match; not only was Fritz from a country he hoped would lead a united Germany, but he was a man with liberal beliefs despite his strict militaristic upbringing. As Vicky’s views dovetailed with her husband’s, they would both find themselves uncomfortably at odds with the conservative Prussian royal family. The alliance would not prove to be as effective as Albert had hoped.
Victoria was more nervous at her eldest daughter’s wedding than she had been at her own; at least then, she said, she knew she would be going home with Albert. She trembled so violently on the frosty morning before the ceremony that her image was blurred on the daguerreotype for which she posed with Vicky and Albert; the other two were perfectly still. The seventeen-year-old Vicky was elegantly dressed in white rippled silk trimmed with lace and wreaths of orange flowers and myrtle. The wedding was held in the Chapel Royal at St. James’s Palace on January 25, 1858—the same place where Victoria and Albert had wed eighteen years earlier. (Victoria had written to the Earl of Clarendon stamping out any suggestion that the wedding might take place in Berlin: “It is not every day that one mar
ries the eldest daughter of the Queen of England.”) On the way to the chapel, Victoria, wearing a mauve velvet dress, struggled not to cry: “I could hardly command myself.” She was proud of her daughter’s poise, but sobbed when she bade her farewell a few days later: “My breaking heart gave way….What a dreadful moment, what a real heartache to think of our dearest Child being gone & not knowing how long it may be before we see her again!”
On February 2, snow fell as Albert walked through the thousand-strong crowd at Gravesend to escort his teenage daughter to the yacht that would ferry her to a new life in Germany. Nearby, small girls sprinkled the paths with flower petals. Albert had dreaded this moment: he was very fond of the astute, gifted daughter who so resembled him—his favorite child and a kindred spirit. The thought of separation was “especially painful.” As the two of them stood in her cabin, Vicky buried her face in Albert’s chest, soaking it with tears. She felt she owed her father more than anyone else. Albert stared ahead, his arms around her. He wrote to her the next day, assuring her of his love, despite his stiffness: “I am not of a demonstrative nature, and therefore you can hardly know how dear you have always been to me, and what a void you have left in my heart.”
In the days after the wedding, Victoria was restless with worry. As she had told Leopold: “She is so much improved in self-control, and is so clever (I may say wonderfully so), and so sensible that we can talk to her of anything—and therefore shall miss her sadly.” What consoled her was that the twenty-six-year-old Fritz, Prince Frederick William of Prussia, was decent, kind, and obviously in love. Then it became quickly obvious that the distance would draw mother and daughter closer. That year, Victoria and Vicky began a torrent of letters that they sometimes wrote daily, totaling almost four thousand over four decades.