by Julia Baird
But in 1874, Disraeli defied his critics. His Conservative Party won a majority of seats in Parliament for the first time since 1841. A delighted Victoria wrote conspiratorially to Vicky: “Did you ever see such a universal and overwhelming result of a Dissolution against a Minister as there is against Mr. Gladstone? It shows how little he is trusted and how unpopular he is!” Albert had liked Gladstone, with his intellectual rigor and devout faith. But Victoria was suspicious of him and had come to the conclusion that he was “a great misfortune.” She considered him bright, but a terrible statesman, pushing legislation simply for the principle at great political cost. Vicky shared her father’s liberalism and naturally identified with Gladstone, but she also felt he was contradictory and “incomprehensible”—a poor politician. Victoria was genuinely puzzled by his popularity and crowed when it dissipated: “Mr. Gladstone is a very dangerous Minister—and so wonderfully unsympathetic.”
Gladstone was also remote and charmless. Worse, he was no fun; no ribald asides or juicy tidbits of gossip. The poet and novelist Emily Eden said Gladstone didn’t talk, he just lectured: “If he were soaked in boiling water and rinsed till he was twisted into a rope, I do not suppose a drop of fun would ooze out.” His briefings were complicated and boring. Victoria complained he spoke to her as though she were a public meeting. A smug Disraeli said, “Gladstone treats the Queen like a public department; I treat her like a woman.” Gladstone’s grand oratorical talent was lost on his queen, and she grew to resent what appeared to be condescension. He utterly lacked the warmth and intimacy that Melbourne, Brown, and Disraeli had all provided. In the words of Lady Rosebery, “Mr. Gladstone may be a marvel of erudition, but he will never understand a man, still less a woman.”
Disraeli understood women. After sitting next to Gladstone, one woman declared, “I thought he was the cleverest man in England. But when I sat next to Disraeli I thought I was the cleverest woman.” It was the greatest essence of charm: a singular, flattering focus. Even when Victoria disagreed with Disraeli, she found him charming, telling Lord Rosebery, “He had a way when we differed…of saying ‘Dear Madam’ so persuasively, and putting his head on one side.” Victoria’s favor was still significant enough to matter to a prime minister; it would be a source of sustenance for Disraeli and sorrow for Gladstone.
Victoria budded in the presence of a man who charmed her, who confided in her and sought her approval. Albert had made people feel stupid—as did Gladstone. But Disraeli made Victoria feel like her best self again. When he came to visit Osborne, he thought she might even embrace him: “She was wreathed with smiles and, as she tattled, glided about the room like a bird.” Sensitive to his gout, the queen even asked him to sit down—the first PM she had granted that honor to since Lord Melbourne. Like Melbourne, Disraeli was also mourning the death of his wife, Mary Anne, with whom he had spent thirty-three years. He developed a genuine, deep affection for Victoria. “I love the Queen,” he told the Dowager Lady Ely after his wife’s death, “perhaps the only person in this world left to me that I do love.”
In many ways, Disraeli was the opposite of Albert. His biographer Robert Blake described him as “proud, flamboyant, quick-witted, generous, emotional, quarrelsome, extravagant, theatrical, addicted to conspiracy, fond of backstairs intrigue.” He saw women as intellectual equals, unlike Albert. Writing about his male secretary, Montagu Corry, Disraeli said, “I like him much better than any other man, but, as a rule, except upon business, male society is not much to my taste.” Even his fiction was written mostly for women. It was probably unfortunate for him that women couldn’t vote; not surprisingly, he was sympathetic to the idea of female suffrage.
Disraeli’s foppish dress, flamboyance, fondness for Turkish baths, close male friendships, and love of older women have led some historians to suggest he was gay or bisexual. There is no definitive evidence to support this and he did have a long-lasting, happy marriage. William Kuhn parsed Disraeli’s books for signs of homoeroticism and effeminacy, arguing that the stories were autobiographical in a time when same-sex love needed to be kept secret: sodomy had been punishable by death as recently as 1861. Kuhn concludes that Disraeli “embraced a sort of doubleness, a conscious ambiguity, such that sexually and romantically he loved both men and women,” and that he was “more than just friends” with Montagu Corry. In his view, Disraeli might have been “what today we might call gay.” His great biographer, Robert Blake, simply suggested he was like the flamboyant Oscar Wilde, who had sexual relationships with men while married to a woman—and the parallels are obvious.
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In the spring of 1877, Russia finally invaded Turkey, in a bid to support the Bulgarians and unite Orthodox Christians. Victoria took it as a personal slight. With each passing month of the war, her resolve grew and her hatred for the Russians hardened under the guise of patriotism. “I rejoice,” she said, “at every Russian defeat.” Ponsonby blamed Disraeli for simplifying the dispute as a chess game between queen and czar. Disraeli played his hand cleverly, restraining the queen with his Cabinet’s division, and prodding his Cabinet with the queen’s staunchness. Victoria dismissed those who disagreed with her as fools or traitors. In her mind, she and Disraeli stood for “the Imperial policy of England,” while Gladstone was a mere “sentimental” crusader. She began mentioning “the British Lion” in her correspondence, threatening he will “bite, now that he is roused.” Russia must know Britain was ready to fight if necessary.
In times of crises, Victoria’s strengths and weaknesses flared in tandem: her loyalty, patriotism, and sense of duty alongside her inability to see an opponent’s position, a stubbornness, and a propensity to frame things as epic black-and-white struggles between good and evil. She saw the vacillators as weak and lacking in resolve, telling Disraeli she’d like to go and whip the Russians herself. When Victoria was unable to bend the parliament to her will, she was miserable. She threatened to abdicate five times between April 1877 and February 1878, rather than witness her country “kiss the feet of the great barbarians.” She decried the MPs as lacking patriotism and decency: “It is a miserable thing to be a constitutional Queen and to be unable to do what is right. I would gladly throw all up and retire into quiet.”
Missives flew out of Victoria’s castles and homes like clouds of bats. Disraeli told his friend Lady Bradford that “the Faery [as he had grown fond of calling her] writes every day and telegraphs every hour.” Disraeli and the queen were now working as partners, and Victoria referred to the two of them as “we.” When Disraeli gained the support of his party to recall Parliament, increase British forces, and engage in direct mediation, she rewarded him by a show of public support. For the first time since she visited Lord Melbourne at Brocket in 1841, she went to Hughenden Manor, the home of the prime minister, for lunch.
In the summer of 1878, Victoria received eleven thousand telegrams during the four weeks she was at Balmoral—most of them about the Eastern Question. In March of that year, the Russians had imposed the secret Treaty of San Stefano on Turkey, which had created an alarmingly large, independent Bulgaria. But the Congress of Berlin, which began on June 13, superseded this agreement; for a month Disraeli and Lord Salisbury, the foreign secretary, negotiated new terms between Russia and Turkey with the help of Prussia and Austria, and destroyed the Treaty of Stefano without war. Bulgaria was made independent, but smaller, and less threatening not just to neighboring states, but also to Britain. Disraeli also managed to snare Cyprus for the British—without apparent justification. He updated the queen by letter each day. The tenacious, vital seventy-three-year-old spent weeks lobbying, maneuvering, socializing, and smoking cigars with a champagne-drinking, corpulent Bismarck until the deal was completed and Disraeli was spent. This agreement remained in place until 1918; Russian expansion into the Mediterranean had been checked and Europe preserved, for now. Bismarck exalted his new British friend: “Der alte Jude, das ist der Mann” (The old Jew, that is the man).
Disraeli r
eturned on July 16 to cheering crowds and rapturous acclaim: it would be his greatest moment as prime minister. War had been avoided, and Britain had gotten what it wanted. Victoria sent him a letter and a nosegay. Flowers had long formed a part of their friendship: she sent him primroses and snowdrops from Osborne that he called a “faery gift.” Victoria was now as fiercely partisan a Tory as she had been a Whig under Lord Melbourne. After the victory in the negotiations at the Congress of Berlin, she swore revenge against the Liberals: “The harm they have done their country is irreparable & I can never forget it.” She was older, but her strength grew, her energy returned, and she unwittingly followed Albert’s advice to immerse herself in something external in order to bury misery. She opened Parliament three times while Disraeli was PM. And she never did forgive Gladstone.
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Queen. Church. Empire. This is how Disraeli defined his party’s philosophy, and how he shaped Tory rhetoric for a century to come. Victoria was his enchanted sovereign, to whom he brought titles and vast tracts of land, simply to please her. The spoils of empire were gratifying trophies. The first thing Disraeli managed to procure was a share of almost half of the Suez Canal, purchased from a bankrupt Turk, the khedive of Egypt, for £4 million in 1875. The rest of the shares were French, and as three-quarters of the ships going through the Canal were British (mostly bound for India), Disraeli leapt at the chance to prevent full French control. The next day, Victoria wrote approvingly to Albert’s biographer Theodore Martin that Disraeli had “very large ideas and very lofty views of the position the country should hold. His mind is so much greater, larger and his apprehension of things great and small so much quicker than that of Mr. Gladstone.”
Benjamin Disraeli almost single-handedly modernized the Tory Party. Politics, in his view, had to center on social justice, reform, and the well-being of the British. His government was a socially progressive one, marking a radical shift from the Tory Party of the aristocracy and the upper middle class to a new party of democracy and the masses. He had outmaneuvered Gladstone in 1867 by defeating him on the Reform Bill, which expanded suffrage to all households—and would have given wealthy men more than one vote—then introducing his own, slightly more progressive bill. When this bill failed, he simplified it to household suffrage alone; when it passed, he took credit for the entirety of the reform. It was masterful politics, cementing his place as future party leader, outraging Gladstone and prompting a redefinition of conservatism. Disraeli had, one commentator said, perceived a new kind of Tory voter in the working classes as a sculptor sees “the angels in the marble.” Working-class Toryism has been a defining feature of British politics ever since, for the likes of Stanley Baldwin, Winston Churchill, Harold Macmillan, and Edward Heath—as well as, most recently, for Margaret Thatcher and John Major. But Disraeli was as pragmatic as he was principled. As soon as he had passed the Second Reform Act, he labored to ensure his Conservative rural seats would be protected from newly enfranchised working-class voters who might oust the Tories.
Under Disraeli’s leadership, slums were torn down and replaced with new housing, and measures were put in place to encourage savings. In 1875, he passed a series of enlightened acts protecting labor rights, arguing they were as important as property rights. Two of the laws ensured that workers would have the same recourse as employers when contracts were breached, and made peaceful picketing legal, protecting unions from charges of conspiracy. The Agricultural Holdings Act meant tenants could be compensated for improvements to property. The Public Health Act made pavements and street lighting mandatory, established local sanitary authorities, and mandated that new buildings would have running water and drainage. The 1878 Factory Act ensured that no child under ten would be allowed to work, that ten- to fourteen-year-olds could only work for half of the day, and women no more than fifty-six hours a week. Other new laws provided funds to be loaned to cities for the creation of working-class housing. Gradually, Victoria watched England become a fairer, more modern country.
Then there were the laws Disraeli pushed through simply to please the queen. The first was the Public Worship Regulation Act in 1874, intended to cleanse the church of Roman influences. (Gladstone opposed it.) The second was the Cruelty to Animals Act in 1876, which forced researchers to demonstrate that any experiments with animals involving pain were absolutely necessary, and ensured they would be anesthetized if so. Finally, Disraeli forced through legislation to give Victoria the title of Empress of India, despite strong opposition and accusations that this was merely about ensuring that the queen had precedence over her daughter-in-law the Grand Duchess Marie (daughter of Alexander II of Russia)—who insisted that she be addressed as “Her Imperial Highess” rather than “Her Royal Highness”—as well as her daughter Vicky, who would become an empress when Fritz inherited the Prussian throne. Others suggested it was a maneuver intended to give her children a higher position at the German courts, an accusation Victoria called “an absolute falsehood.” She had considered the title to be informally hers ever since Britain took over India in 1858, and opposition to it perplexed her. After all, Bertie had just had a most triumphant trip to India, where he swashbuckled through tiger and elephant hunts and charmed his hosts. On May Day 1876, the queen was formally announced Empress of India. It was one of her proudest moments. She dipped her quill in the well and carefully signed “Victoria R & I” (Regina et Imperatrix).
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But tragedy continued to lurk in the wings of Victoria’s life. She was growing older, well into her fifties now, and with each year the losses and heartbreaks mounted. One morning in May 1873, Alice’s two boys, Ernest and Frederick William (called Fritz or “Frittie”), were playing hide-and-seek. Alice walked away from them for a moment, stuck her head out the door, and called for the nurse to come and take the children. Suddenly the toddler Fritz walked to the window, scrambled onto the window ledge, and toppled over, landing on the balcony below. His mother’s shriek pierced the walls; bystanders turned their heads on the streets below. The little boy, a hemophiliac, was unconscious. He had not broken any bones, but his brain hemorrhaged, and he died.
Almost exactly three years later, in 1876, Helena’s baby boy had a series of convulsions and died. Wretched and distant in Scotland, Victoria kept having visions of the baby in front of her, a child she had thought would recover. The family buried another tiny coffin, this time in the vault of St. George’s Chapel, Windsor. Victoria placed a locket containing the child’s hair around her neck: Why was there such unending sorrow? she thought. Poor Helena. And poor Alice. When the Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt died in 1877, Alice’s husband, Louis, succeeded him, and Alice’s workload trebled. She must arrange for a holiday for the poor girl, Victoria thought. Even during the war, while pregnant, Alice had waddled about hospitals, bandaging soldiers and cleaning up. In the summer of 1878, Victoria paid for the whole family to have a holiday at Eastbourne, a popular seaside resort on England’s south coast.
Sickness never seemed far from the sprawling royal brood. Late in 1878, diphtheria infected Alice’s family in Hesse-Darmstadt. Alice watched over her five children, red-eyed with worry. On November 16, her three-year-old daughter May died. Soon Alice, too, fell ill. When the queen heard Alice had been stricken, she cried, sent her doctor to Hesse, and waited nervously for reports. She consulted with Bertie and Leopold and, superstitiously, went to pray in the Blue Room, where Alice had nursed her father during the blackest days of her life. On December 14, the day Albert had died, Alice passed away: exactly seventeen years later. She was only thirty-five.
John Brown brought Victoria the telegrams, and stood by her side as she sobbed:
That this dear, talented, distinguished, tender hearted, noble minded, sweet child, who behaved so admirably, during her dear Father’s illness, & afterwards, in supporting me, & helping me in every possible way,—should be called back to her Father, on this very anniversary, seems almost incredible, & most mysterious!
The grief drew the fam
ily closer. Bertie was ill over the loss of his adored, naughty childhood ally, and he stuttered to Victoria, “The good are always taken, the bad remain.” Then, just three months later, Vicky’s youngest child, Waldemar, died from diphtheria. Vicky was devastated, again. She wept when her visits to England ended; she wanted to come more often, but Victoria would not always allow it. Vicky’s precise, philosophical brain—which Albert had so carefully tended—was of little use in her new role as a wife and mother. “On the whole,” she told Victoria wistfully, “one may say that unintelligent women are the happiest, if going through life as smoothly as possible really constitutes happiness.” Her eldest child, William, the future kaiser, whose wasted arm had troubled her so much, was growing up to be rude, hateful, and disrespectful.
From now on, Victoria would take an especially keen interest in Alice’s offspring, her five motherless grandchildren. What she didn’t know was that one of them would be blamed for starting a revolution. Alice’s daughter Alexandra, who married Czar Nicolas II, passed the hemophilia gene to her son Alexis. She would fall under the sway of the soi-disant holy man Rasputin because of his apparent unearthly ability to calm the boy and even stop his bleeding.
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In 1879, the queen turned sixty. She was, at last, sprouting gray hairs. She felt older, and the loss of Alice had “shaken the elasticity out” of her. She was now considerably rounder, and she seemed to have shrunk in height. Lady Cavendish wrote in her diary on March 17, 1879, that while the queen at a wedding carried herself beautifully in long, sweeping black-and-white attire, “I do think H.M. has grown down and is a shorter woman than ever.” Victoria insisted on being painted with a serious expression, worthy of a monarch, while privately dismissing her “ugly old face.” In the eyes of her granddaughter Sophie, though, she was like a little doll: “My dear Grandmama is very tiny—a very, very pretty little girl.” She had grown stronger in the heat of the affection of her two men—Brown and Disraeli. It was almost unthinkable that in just four years, the two great buttresses of her life would vanish from it.