Victoria

by Julia Baird

  I, like everyone else in the house make the most ample allowance for your state….We cannot, unhappily, bear your bodily sufferings for you—you must struggle with them alone—the moral ones are probably caused by them, but if you were rather less occupied with yourself and your feelings and took more interest in the outside world, you would find that the greatest help of all.

  Albert urged his wife to let God’s goodness lift her out of the pain, “degradation [and] indignation” she described to him. What no historians have mentioned as a factor in her ambivalent attitude toward childbearing is the cost to her physical—and mental—health, which she kept hidden for the rest of her life.

  In many ways Victoria was not a natural mother. Albert told her that the reason she did not enjoy the children was because she mistakenly thought the job of a mother was to discipline: “The root of the trouble lies in the mistaken notion that the function of a mother is to be always correcting, scolding, ordering them about and organizing their activities. It is not possible to be on happy friendly terms with people you have just been scolding.” When Bertie was still a boy, his governor—then Lord Clarendon—described “the Queen’s severe way of treating her children” as “very injudicious,” especially with the strong-willed, self-certain Bertie.

  In June 1856, Vicky burned her arm when a candle she was using to melt wax to seal a letter set her sleeve on fire. Victoria was at her daughter’s side every day when the wound was carefully dressed.

  Sometimes Victoria’s children bored her, and sometimes they delighted her. She wrote fondly of the sweet, pretty “Lenchen” (Helena), her amiable, selfless Alice, and the hemophiliac Leopold, who struggled with ailments but was “a clever, honest & well intentioned boy.” She clearly favored Beatrice, Vicky, and Affie, the last of whom she described as a “sunbeam in the house” and “so like his precious father.” When speaking of Arthur, she said, “Children are a great comfort to me at such times, for their happy innocent unconsciousness is refreshing and cheering to one’s heart.” When Albert refused to allow her to take her younger children with her to visit Vicky in Prussia in 1858, she called him a “hard-hearted and a great tyrant.” Not long after, when Affie was sent away for several months to join HMS Euryalus, a steam frigate heading for the Mediterranean via Gibraltar, she told Vicky that “Papa is most cruel upon the subject. I assure you, it is much better to have no children than to have them only to give them up! It is too wretched.” She and her children watched eclipses and comets through telescopes, gazed at the ugly whale-headed storks at the zoo, and marveled at a remarkable performance from the American “horse whisperer,” who was able to tame wild horses almost instantly into submission. Mostly theirs was a life of stability; the closeness between Victoria and Albert was the pole that the family, and the nation, circled. Their children grew up observed and controlled, but they formed their own alliances and rebellions, like Alice and Bertie, who sneaked out for cigarettes.

  —

  Victoria consulted calendars obsessively. She marked important dates and anniversaries in her diary—not just birthdays and wedding days, but the day Albert arrived in England before their engagement, the day they got engaged, the day Albert arrived in England for their marriage, the day Fritz declared his intention to marry Vicky, the day Vicky and Fritz were officially engaged, and the day they married. She noted anniversaries of battles, the fall of the French Orleans family, the opening of the Great Exhibition, the day Vicky burned her arm badly, and the time Albert jumped out of his carriage in Coburg, scratching his face. Victoria clutched at time with the manner of a woman unused to contentment and terrified at the possibility of it ending. She disliked change.

  The year 1860 ended on an anxious note. Victoria was worried about war. She told Vicky she was sick of “horrid” politics and the Continent in general and one day wanted to escape to Australia with the children. Albert kissed her head and told her to trust in God; he would protect them as he had done before. Victoria was also concerned about the health of her mother. When the Duchess of Kent rallied after a bout of illness in 1859, Victoria wrote to Leopold that she had never suffered as she had in the four hours she spent waiting to hear whether her mother was going to survive: “I hardly myself knew how I loved her, or how my whole existence seems bound up with her, till I saw looming in the distance the fearful possibility of what I will not mention.” She felt guilty about her bullheadedness as a teenager. Loss was her greatest fear.

  —

  On March 16, 1861, after several months of ill health, back pain, and infection, the Duchess of Kent died. Victoria was sitting on a footstool holding her mother’s hand when she realized she had stopped breathing. As a tearful Albert bent to pick her up and take her to the next room, she was overwhelmed: “My childhood, all seems to crowd in upon me.” She wrote to her uncle Leopold, her mother’s brother: “On this, the most dreadful day of my life, does your poor broken-hearted child write one line of love and devotion. She is gone!”

  Victoria cried for weeks, lying in her room with curtains drawn. She slept and ate poorly, thinking of how silly her estrangement from her mother had been two decades earlier and of how much she missed her. She adopted her mother’s Scottish terrier, commissioned a bust, combed through her letters, and began disposing of her possessions. Vicky returned from Germany to be with her, and her youngest child, Beatrice, occasionally cheered her with her “sweet innocent little voice & prattle.”

  But Victoria, then forty-one, had plunged into a depression, which she described as an oppressive, fatiguing cloud. She could not bear loud conversation or crowds. A fortnight after her mother’s death, she was only conscious of a great emptiness, a “blank, or desolation,” “Sehnsucht and Wehmut” (yearning and nostalgia). A daily bout of uncontrollable weeping was her only relief. Her headaches were severe and frequent; she was grateful for the fact that the rubber wheels on her pony carriage made no noise. Just the sound of Bertie’s voice sent her wild with irritation.

  Soon, whispers of madness began to circulate; they were never far away, given the fate of the queen’s grandfather King George III. Albert told his brother, “Victoria is very well and I cannot understand how these horrid, vile rumors about her mental state could arise. They have annoyed me tremendously as I know what the consequences may be.”

  Yet Albert too, aware of Victoria’s capacity for longing and nostalgia, cautioned her not to founder in her grief. Her great task in life was, he said, “controlling her feelings.” He wrote a memorandum to her several months after her mother had died, in October 1861:

  My advice to be less occupied with yourself and your own feelings is really the kindest I can give for pain is felt chiefly by dwelling on it and can thereby be heightened to an unbearable extent….If you will take increased interest in things unconnected with personal feelings, you will find the task much lightened of governing those feelings in general which you state to be your great difficulty in life.

  Victoria was a naturally sentimental, sometimes clingy person who grew greatly attached to people and places; she hated leaving Osborne, then Balmoral, and she held her breath waiting for Albert to return whenever he left on business. She carefully recorded the comings and goings of all her family in her journal and lamented anyone’s absence. She was peculiarly vulnerable to strong grief, and there was a part of the mourning process that gratified the queen, as though she were pressing on a sore. She told Vicky in April that she didn’t want to be “roused out of” her grief. It was this that thwarted Albert’s campaign against her self-absorption.

  —

  On Victoria’s forty-second birthday, in 1861, she asked that no music be played outside her window. She wanted only to relish Albert’s “tender love and affection,” in what had become an intimate birthday ritual. Her dear husband, she wrote poignantly, was her “all in all, whom God will I am sure ever bless for years to come, & never let me survive!” As she grew older she also grew nervous about the prospect of losing anyone close to her. O
n Feodora’s fiftieth birthday, Victoria, having only just lost her half brother, Charles, wrote: “May God long preserve this dear, & only sister! I tremble so now for all those dear to me!”

  Albert’s health was fragile; he had chronic stomach problems involving violent cramping; he suffered from the cold and had frequent headaches, fevers, toothaches, and, especially, catarrh. Too much work and excitement, he told Stockmar in May 1859, kept his “mucous membranes in a state of constant irritation.” Sometimes stress led to bouts of vomiting. Victoria blamed it on overwork, and was always impatient for him to recover. She privately believed he made too much of a fuss, as though he were suffering from a Victorian form of “man flu.” While Albert chastised his wife for emotional frailty, she chastised him in return for physical weakness. (This was the woman who, after all, was unfazed by multiple assassination attempts.) She complained to Vicky in a letter in 1861:

  Dear Papa never allows he is any better or will try to get over it, but makes such a miserable face that people always think he’s very ill. It is quite the contrary with me always; I can do anything before others and never show it, so people never believe I am ill or ever suffer. His nervous system is easily excited and irritated and he’s so completely overpowered by everything.

  Women, she said, were “born to suffer.”

  The Prince Consort was deeply exhausted. In September 1860, on a trip to Coburg to visit his brother, Ernest (now Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha), Albert dived out of a moving carriage when his horses bolted. He was bruised and scratched. Stockmar, looking at Albert’s minor cuts, said quietly to Ernest: “God have mercy on us! If anything serious should ever happen to him, he will die.” Ernest also reported signs of morbidity in the maudlin Albert. When they went out together for their last walk in Coburg in October, Ernest said, “Albert stood still, and suddenly felt for his pocket handkerchief….I went up to him and saw that tears were trickling down his cheeks…he persisted in declaring that he was well aware that he had been here for the last time in his life.” Albert was depressed, and “the dragon of his dissatisfaction” gnawed at him.

  The father of nine was unable to stop working. Life, in his mind, was an interminable treadmill. He saw himself as a kind of indentured pack animal, writing to his brother: “Man is a beast of burden and he is only happy if he has to drag his burden and if he has little free will. My experience teaches me every day to understand the truth of this more and more.” His endless, solitary deer-stalking escapades seemed unable to ease his fatigue. Victoria had become intensely dependent upon him, and she resented his absence in a fashion that became oppressive. When he went to Aberdeen for one night to give a speech, she told Leopold, “I feel so lost without him.” She had forgotten her own colossal strength. It lay dormant for years as she worshipped and relied on her ailing, driven husband.

  On a Saturday in June 1861, a great fire erupted in London. Victoria and Albert, down in the gardens of Buckingham Palace, saw the sky light up in a peculiar way and went up to the palace roof to watch the flames.

  The sight was fearful, the sky quite lurid, & the flames shooting up furiously…lighting up the whole town & giving a terrifying aspect of destruction….The whole scene was weird & striking, Westminster’s white towers rising to the right of the conflagration, the moon shining beautifully, the night warm & still interrupted by the striking of “Big Ben” in the Westminster Tower, & the Tattoo from the Barracks.

  It was thought that the Tooley Street fire began by spontaneous combustion in the middle of warehouses jammed with jute, hemp, cotton, and spices. The fire soon burned a quarter of a mile along the south bank of the Thames, creating a hundred-foot wall of flames. Spectators rowed up and down the river, which glowed gold in the firelight. The fire would burn for two more days, and would not be completely extinguished for two more weeks; six people died, including the chief of the fire brigade when a warehouse collapsed on him.

  Victoria stood on the roof of her palace and watched for hours, staring at the smoke and bursts of red flame. What she did not realize, as she eventually turned her back on the fire to go to bed, was that before the end of that year, her own happy life would be destroyed.

  CHAPTER 20

  “There Is No One to Call Me Victoria Now”

  I tremble for the Queen.

  —CHARLES GREVILLE,

  DECEMBER 14, 1861

  Bertie thrust his head out of the window and scanned the grounds of the military camp of Curragh. The last post had sounded hours ago at the curfew time of 9:30 P.M. He quickly walked out of his headquarter hut past two small tents and his guards, who didn’t notice him. Making his way through the blackness, he found the hut he was looking for and poked his head through the door. Inside, the voluptuous Irish actress Nellie Clifden was waiting. His friends had smuggled her into the camp as a treat for the nineteen-year-old Prince of Wales.

  “Fast women” were increasingly common in the 1860s, a decade of a forgotten but determined progress toward emancipation. Single women began to rebel in greater numbers: smoking, flirting openly, mixing freely with unmarried men. Books of that era are peppered with complaints about the looseness of the younger generations. Some young women even embraced the term “fast,” which was astonishing to polite society. One novelist wrote: “Oh, that any British maiden should unblushingly, nay, and without the slightest feeling of shame, even glory in such a title! But so it is, in the year 1861.” Even in 1868, while traveling in Switzerland, Victoria noticed among a crowd who gathered to see her “independent young English ladies, specimens of the present most objectionable ‘fast young lady.’ ” She added: “Some were no doubt American.”

  Pretty Nellie Clifden is commonly described as a woman of “easy virtue.” Bertie became intoxicated with her world of the theater, so different from the tightly laced royal court. He reveled in the thrill of the illicit when he was with her and in the fun to be had at the clubs where his cachet as heir was unparalleled. He drank, smoked, tipped whisky over the heads of sycophants, and flirted with women. His jokes were laughed at, his desires indulged, and—best of all—his parents were absent. Puffing on his black pipe, he wrote about Nellie in his engagement diary in code.

  6 Sept.  Curragh—N.C. 1st time

  9 Sept.  Curragh—N.C. 2nd time

  10 Sept.  Curragh—N.C. 3rd time

  The eldest son of the pious, brilliant Albert grew up with daily reminders that he had somehow failed his parents and would never meet their expectations. Albert’s Teutonic discipline, regimented schedule, and labored moral instructions failed to change his son. Although he was an entertaining and kind young man, the story of “poor Bertie,” as Victoria called him, was always one of disappointment. He followed an exacting seven-day school schedule that failed to inculcate a love of learning. His father decided he lacked the ability to concentrate, with a mind “of no more use than a pistol packed at the bottom of a trunk”—useless.

  Even Bertie’s secret fling at Curragh in the summer of 1861 was conducted in the crucible of failure. Albert had decreed that Bertie “should be subjected to ten weeks course of infantry training, under the strictest discipline which could be devised, at the Curragh Camp near Dublin” so he might develop some discipline and fiber. Bertie performed poorly, and his superior officer told his parents that he would not be able to command a battalion by the end of his stay. Victoria and Albert visited the Irish camp and watched him go through his drills and perform a junior role without distinction (although Victoria thought he looked fetching in his uniform). During that visit, Albert was left with a sinking feeling: Would his son ever be good at anything? What kind of king would he become? There was an unmistakeable irony: Bertie would have the title Albert had always craved, and yet he would not deserve it. Both parents regretted that their eldest was more like his mother than his father. Bertie was Victoria’s “caricature,” and in a man, the queen sighed, that was so much worse. Victoria had perhaps been more interested in books and learning as a child, but
she and her son shared a volatility, a hot temper, and a love of fun.

  What Albert and Victoria failed to recognize was how their son could represent the throne not through intellect but through cheer. Bertie’s 1860 trip to Canada and America, the first made by an heir to the British crown, was a smashing success. In Canada, when he was eighteen, he opened bridges, danced vigorously, and even agreed to wheel a French acrobat across the Niagara Falls in a wheelbarrow, although his minders stopped it. He was immensely popular in the United States, where he traveled incognito between engagements. In New York, he was given a standing ovation, and a ballroom floor collapsed under the weight of the crowd gathering to see him. American newspapers also reported he had overt flirtations with the ladies, “whispering sweet nothings.” The queen, briefly, approved, and found Bertie very talkative on his return. She attributed his enthusiastic reception in America as coming “principally from the (to me incredible) liking they have for my unworthy self.” The next king of England was destined to rebel for decades.

  —

  Prince Albert first heard the rumors of his son’s thespian liaison with Nellie Clifden from Baron Stockmar, then in Germany, who had stumbled upon the story in European papers. The gossip had been swirling about the London clubs for weeks. The subterranean Hanoverian streak Albert feared in his son had now spilled into public view; the embarrassment caused to the monarchy by Victoria’s uncles seemed likely to resume. Albert felt physically ill, and his gut flared with pain. Sexual looseness was Albert’s psychological Achilles’ heel: his own family had been destroyed by infidelity, and his only brother had contracted syphilis. Albert was incapable of viewing trysts as casual, inevitable, or meaningless; for him, they could only contain the seeds of ruin. In the nineteenth century, this kind of affair could mean not just scandal, but disease, pregnancy, court cases, and financial ruin.