Victoria

by Julia Baird

  The queen’s candor also applied to the dignitaries who swept through her palaces. When she met the author Thomas Carlyle, for example, she described him as “a strange-looking eccentric old Scotchman, who holds forth, in a drawling melancholy voice, with a broad Scotch accent upon Scotland and upon the utter degeneration of everything.” (He, in turn, gushed about her “kindly little smile,” and her “rather attractive” appearance. It was impossible, he told his sister, “to imagine a politer little woman.”)

  By 1870, people regarded Victoria with something approaching panic. How could they get her to appear in public again? Her children and ministers all shared the same dim view: her seclusion was damaging the monarchy. The longer she stayed out of sight, the more her subjects’ fondness for her dwindled. Ponsonby was despondent: “If she is neither the head of the Executive nor the fountain of honor, nor the center of display, the royal dignity will sink to nothing at all.” Even Disraeli was glum. He worried that the monarchy was in danger, not from any republican movement, or hostility, but from “gradual loss of prestige”: the queen had made people believe they could do very well without her. There was a growing sense that affection for the monarch was not self-replenishing, but could be exhausted by her absence.

  At the end of 1871, Victoria fell ill—the worst she had felt since she had typhoid as a teenager. When she was still recovering, Bertie suddenly collapsed into a fever with symptoms eerily similar to those Albert had suffered exactly ten years earlier. The family panicked. Three times, Victoria journeyed to Sandringham, where Bertie lived with Alix, expecting to kiss a cold brow. She stood apprehensively behind a screen in his room and listened to his breathing. She had never loved him more than in those moments, when she thought she might lose him. Thousands of letters and telegrams poured in; the public grief was extraordinary. Crowds swarmed around newspaper offices, waiting for bulletins. Priests cried out to God in their Sunday sermons, asking for Bertie to live. The nation warmed to the sight of a family miserably teetering on the precipice of great loss. Just as the British had failed to recognize Albert’s gifts until he had died, one newspaper mused that perhaps the same was true of Bertie. He had gifts of another class, more popular than intellectual: a “geniality” in performing ceremonial duties, an “English love of sport,” and lastly a characteristic of great use in a royal: an “apparent willingness to place his services at the disposal of anyone who wants a foundation stone laid or a bazaar opened.”

  The fact that Bertie survived was considered miraculous. A thankful Victoria wrote: “We all feel that if God has spared his life it is to enable him to lead a new life.” Gladstone leapt at the chance to capitalize on the revived affection for the monarchy and suggested a rousing thanksgiving service be held on February 27, 1872, in St. Paul’s Cathedral. Victoria was bored in the church, and found St. Paul’s “cold, dreary and dingy,” but the roars of millions who stood outside in the cold under a lead-colored sky made her triumphant, and she pressed Bertie’s hand in a dramatic flourish. It was “a great holy day” for the people of London, The Times declared gravely. They wished to show the queen she was as beloved as ever. Their delight at seeing her in person was as much a cause for celebration as Bertie’s recovery.

  This moment revealed something that Bertie would quickly grasp though his mother had not: the British public requires ceremony and pageantry, and the chance to glimpse a sovereign in finery. It was not a republic her subjects were hankering for, but a visible queen. As Lord Halifax said, people wanted their queen to look like a queen, with a crown and scepter: “They want the gilding for their money.” Victoria considered it intrusive, but her son instinctively understood the importance of this kind of performance. He rose to wave and bow to the country that his mother expected to love her regardless.

  Just two days later, Victoria was shot at again as she drove into Buckingham Palace. She credited Brown’s “great presence of mind and quickness” for grabbing the man by the throat and forcing him to drop the pistol—“Brown alone saw him spring round and suspected him.” For this, she created a new category of award—the “Victoria Devoted Service Medal,” for a “very special act of devotion to the Sovereign,” which was gold and bore her head on one side. (Brown appears to have been the sole recipient of this medal.) She also pinned a silver medal for “long and faithful service” to his broad chest with satisfaction. Brown had not just restored her enthusiasm for living, he had saved her life, she thought over and over as they rode for miles over the Highlands.

  —

  Victoria still longed to crawl into smaller and smaller homes. She grew more introverted as she aged, and her hatred of noise grew to rival her hatred of heat. The sounds of children yelling and screaming annoyed her, and she was convinced that her nerves—strained by work, anxiety, and rebellious children—would never recover. She wrote to Vicky:

  I know that you have many great difficulties—and that your position is no easy one, but so is mine full of trials and difficulties and of overwhelming work—requiring that rest which I cannot get. The very large family with their increasing families and interests is an immense difficulty and I must add burden for me. Without a husband and father, the labour of satisfying all (which is impossible) and of being just and fair, and kind—and yet keeping often quiet which is what I require too much is quite fearful.

  —

  The only place she could get complete rest was in the tiny cottage called Glassalt Shiel, hidden in the firs on snow-covered hills around the ink-black Loch Muick in the Highlands.

  Gradually her strength returned. She began to dance and travel again. She even allowed herself to look at her sheet music once more, her piano duet books bringing back memories of Albert. Finally, her recollections brought more joy than pain: “The past has seemed to rush in upon me in a strange & marvellous manner.”

  —

  Victoria rarely dreamed of Albert. Instead, she dreamed of her mother: “Married life has totally ceased,” she wrote, “and I suppose that is why I feel as though I were again living with her.” On her fifty-second birthday, in 1871, Victoria wrote: “Alone, alone, as it will ever be.” She had no husband, no official partner in her duties as ruler and mother. But she did have Brown, a man whose relationship defied categories: best friend, consigliere, confidant, companion, intimate. “No one loves you more than I do,” Victoria told Brown, often. He would answer seriously, “Nor you—than me. No one loves you more.” He was closer to her than her own children and was the only person, said Henry Ponsonby, who could “fight and make the Queen do what she did not wish.” When she was ill, sons and daughters were not called for: Brown was. Had her family come, cried Victoria’s financial manager (or Keeper of the Privy Purse), Thomas Biddulph, “that would have killed her at once.” As she explained to Vicky,

  When one’s beloved Husband is gone, & one’s Children are married—one feels that a friend…who can devote him or herself entirely to you is the one thing you do require to help you on—& to sympathize entirely with you. Not that you love your Children less—but you feel as they grow up & marry that you can be of so little use to them, & they to you (especially in the Higher Classes).

  On January 1, 1877, Victoria sent a card to Brown with a picture of a chambermaid on the front. She wrote on it: “To my best friend JB / From his best friend V.R.I.” Inside, it read:

  I send my serving maiden

  With New Year letter laden,

  Its words will prove

  My faith and love

  To you my heart’s best treasure,

  Then smile on her and smile on me

  And let your answer loving be,

  And give me pleasure.

  Brown answered with his life.

  * * *

  * The diplomatic Ponsonby had served as an equerry to Albert, and was made the queen’s private secretary in 1870. As a Liberal, he would be a strong democratic influence in the royal household, along with his feminist wife, Mary Bulteel, whom the queen found intimidati
ngly clever. She grew reliant on Ponsonby, though, and appreciated his tolerance for Brown—whom he called “Child of Nature.”

  CHAPTER 24

  The Faery Queen Awakes

  “I don’t know what you mean by your way,” said the Queen, “all the ways about here belong to me.”

  —LEWIS CARROLL,

  THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS

  What nerve! What muscle! What energy!

  —BENJAMIN DISRAELI ON

  QUEEN VICTORIA, NOVEMBER 26, 1879

  One morning in June 1875, while breakfasting in the cottage at the aptly named Frogmore, Victoria suddenly noticed an “immense number of little frogs” swarming the grounds of Windsor Castle. There were thousands of them, “hopping & crawling all over the grass & paths, which seemed to increase…making the grass look, as if it were alive!” Horrified, she ordered her servants to sweep the paths for hours, until they were clear of the “disgusting” creatures. The tiny frogs made her skin prickle. A naturalist told her the frogs had come from far away to breed in the pond at Windsor but would soon disperse, much like a plague of locusts. Victoria, who would go to some lengths to save the life of an old turtle and wept at the thought of dogs in pain, still found the sight of the frogs “quite dreadful.”

  A year later, they were gone. The paths at Windsor were swept, the lawns trimmed, and the hedges clipped. The queen’s life was an ordered and comfortable one; she bent nature, and the world, to her liking. But the political landscape around her was rapidly evolving as the Turkish Empire declined, the Austrian hold on Europe was slipping, and a unified Italy and Germany were growing in influence. Europe was heaving after Turkish mercenaries committed bloody acts of barbarity against rebelling Bulgarians (then part of the Ottoman Empire). In July 1876, while on a train to St. Petersburg, the Russian poet Ivan Turgenev wrote a poem, “Croquet at Windsor,” which likened the croquet balls Victoria was happily whacking to the severed heads of Bulgarian women and children rolling around the feet of Turkish militia. The hem of her dress was soaked in blood. The Russian press refused to publish the poem for fearing of offending Victoria; handwritten copies were passed around instead.

  The Turkish atrocities were gruesome. The skulls of Bulgarians were carried on spikes or piled on carts, pregnant women were ripped open and rows of fetuses brandished on bayonets, children sold into slavery and harems, women savagely raped, people locked inside churches and burned alive. “Christian heads,” wrote one correspondent, were “tossed about the market place, like balls from one Turk to another.” Yet few in England could work up outrage over what would become one of the greatest atrocities of the Victorian age. Disraeli dismissed it as “coffee house babble.” The queen was sure the stories were exaggerated. The Turks, after all, were their allies. The British had spent years helping to protect their borders from the barbaric Russians.

  Parliament was inexcusably slow to investigate the actions of the Turks. By downplaying the nature of the atrocities even when their extent became apparent, Disraeli grossly underestimated the public mood. He planned to continue to shore up a weakening Turkey against Russia’s advances, largely to protect the British trade route to India. His instincts were wrong. It was left to the newspapers—in particular the Daily News, which published a report on June 23 estimating the number of dead Christians as between eighteen and thirty thousand—to press the politicians to properly investigate.

  Since the Ottoman Turks had taken possession of nearby Bulgaria—which perched on the western side of its northern border—five hundred years before, the Bulgarians had chafed at their (mostly military) rule. When they rebelled in 1876, the reprisals were swift. Most acts of reprisal were carried out against Christians by bashi-bazouks, harsh mercenaries who themselves had to be restrained occasionally by the Turkish forces they worked for. Victoria described them as “horribly cruel mutilators…with narrow faces, and pointed beards, dressed in no uniform…with many knives stuck about in their belts.” She was loyal to the stubborn Disraeli, but she began to realize there was truth to the rumors.

  More than two decades after the Crimean War, Turkey—the sick man of Europe—threatened to collapse again. The Eastern Question wasn’t resolved. There were now two competing matters of concern for Britain: the stability of their ally Turkey, and the fate of Christian subjects in Turkish lands. Agitators argued that the rest of Europe should intervene to protect the Christian subjects. The other side worried this would only give Russia permission to go to war with Turkey on behalf of the Orthodox Christians in Bulgaria who looked to Russia for protection. Russia still was determined to break Turkey up and gain an entrance to the Mediterranean Sea through Constantinople, just as Britain was determined to keep it together, to maintain their authority in the region and their access to India.

  Upon reading of the atrocities in the papers, Gladstone, who was now sixty-six and in a state of semiretirement after resigning from the leadership of the Liberal Party, was enraged. It was not just a battle of civilization against tyranny, he thought, but darkness against faith. As a Christian, who had been occupied writing theological tomes since his resignation, he was particularly angry about the religious persecution of other Christians. From his bed, he wrote a thunderous pamphlet calling on the Turks to leave Bulgaria. His most famous work, Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East, came out on September 6, 1876, and was an instant bestseller. Two hundred thousand copies sold in the first month. But Victoria, who favored realpolitik over high-mindedness and interventionism, said he was just adding “fuel to the flame.”

  Gladstone had a better knack for reading the mood of the people than did Disraeli; this was clear now. He was a fit, intellectual man who was fond of bow ties and wore a habitually serious expression. He had been in the House of Commons for forty-four years, serving in a host of positions. As the Turkey debate raged, he quickly became the most authoritative figure in the opposition. He also loathed Disraeli: their mutual contempt and competition made for the greatest political rivalry of the century.

  By late 1876, the country was galvanized, and pressure mounted on the government to act. Public opinion was building on Gladstone’s side, seeing the need to act to protect the Bulgarians. Thomas Carlyle—with John Ruskin (who called Disraeli and Gladstone “two old bagpipes”)—led some of the hundreds of meetings organized against the Turks and protesting their presence in Bulgaria. Charles Darwin contributed fifty pounds to a relief fund. Victor Hugo satirized the tendency of men like Disraeli to dismiss the horrors as overblown: “The child that was thrown from the point of one lance to another was in fact only pierced with a bayonet.” Oscar Wilde, then twenty-two and studying the classics at Oxford, and earning a reputation as a long-haired, decadent aesthete with a fondness for carrying sunflowers, sent Gladstone a copy of his poem “Sonnet on the Massacre of the Christians in Bulgaria.”

  But Victoria—who had performed mysterious mental acrobatics in order to blame Russia somehow for the Turkish atrocities and to hold Gladstone responsible for whipping up anti-Turkish sentiment—was angry. Gladstone was a mere “mischief maker and firebrand.” The increasingly conservative queen chastised her daughter Vicky for showing sympathy to the liberal cause. By Victoria’s rationale, the British Empire’s prestige would be upheld if Britain made it clear to Russia that they would protect Turkey’s interests if the Russians invaded Constantinople. Her Cabinet was divided on the subject, but Disraeli agreed; together they acted secretly to communicate this to the Russians in August 1877, an extraordinary act especially given that not even the foreign minister was aware of it. There had been much dissection of the disastrous Crimean War in the two decades since it ended, and many both inside and outside Parliament were of the view that if Britain had been more emphatic about protecting Turkey, Russia would not have invaded in the first place. Victoria and Disraeli’s core concern was protection of British power.

  Disraeli erred by refusing to unequivocally condemn the atrocities in public. He worried that improving the lot of
the Balkan Slavs might cause problems domestically; it would make Irish autonomy look more logical. But his aims were unclear, aside from breaking up the affronting League of the Three Emperors—an alliance between Germany, Russia, and Austria-Hungary that Bismarck formed in 1873. The aim of the League was to control Eastern Europe—“which Disraeli regarded as an affront to British prestige.” For Gladstone, foreign policy was about morality. For Disraeli, it was about power.

  —

  Benjamin Disraeli was an unlikely prime minister. He dressed like a dandy in lurid velvet suits, with rings over his gloves and a curl in the middle of his forehead. He affected a goatee, rouged cheeks, and a faintly weary, quizzical expression. He had inveigled his way into the center of British society through charm, but Disraeli was an outsider (he remains Britain’s only prime minister of Jewish descent). In between his two stints as prime minister, he wrote a bestselling novel, Lothair—his sixteenth. A talent for popular fiction at that time, in the mid- to late nineteenth century, was considered somewhat suspect: instead of occupying himself, as other gentlemen did, with “classical, historical or constitutional studies,” he wrote a “gaudy romance” that to some “revived all the former doubts as to whether a Jewish literary man, so dowered with imagination, and so unconventional in his outlook, was the proper person to lead a Conservative party to victory.”