by Julia Baird
CHAPTER 25
Enough to Kill Any Man
The Queen alone is enough to kill any man.
—WILLIAM GLADSTONE
It is difficult to pinpoint a precise moment when dislike calcifies into loathing. But for Victoria, 1880 was, at the very least, a year when her ill will toward Gladstone morphed into barely concealed hostility. In April 1880, a telegram with the news that Disraeli had lost the parliamentary election arrived in Baden-Baden, Germany, where she was holidaying. Disraeli was not prepared for such a result, nor had he prepared his Faery Queen. “This is a terrible telegram,” she told her private secretary, Henry Ponsonby, who was shocked by the language she used. Disraeli wrote that he was devastated: “His relations with your Majesty were his chief, he might almost say his only, happiness and interest in this world. They came to him when he was alone, and they have inspired and sustained him in his isolation.” Victoria responded conspiratorially that she hoped they would be able to write to each other “on many a private subject and without anyone being astonished or offended, and even better without anyone knowing about it.” (She had done this before, with Melbourne. It was not strictly illegal, but it undermined the convention that monarchs do not correspond with members of the opposition as it might be perceived as undermining the government.)
Even worse than losing Disraeli was the thought that Gladstone might replace him. Victoria traveled back to England later that month preoccupied: how could she prevent “the People’s William” from becoming the People’s Prime Minister? She told Disraeli it would be impossible to send for Gladstone and ask him to form a government “as I could only say that I cd not trust him or give him my confidence.” (Nor was she technically obliged to, as he had earlier resigned as the leader of the Liberals.) Henry Ponsonby told her repeatedly she must call Gladstone, but Victoria took several days to consult with other Liberals in an attempt to avoid it. On April 4, she wrote: “She will sooner abdicate than send for or have any communication with that half mad firebrand who wd soon ruin everything & be a Dictator. Others but herself may submit to his democratic rule but not the Queen.” Another bout of self-pity erupted: must a “no longer young” widow really take on a man who had been the enemy of her government?
But Gladstone was far older, more prepossessing, and more authoritative than the two other possible candidates who shared the leadership of the Liberal Party, which was now in power. Both had the right of refusal: Lord “Harty-Tarty” Hartington—the Liberal leader in the House of Commons—and “Pussy” Granville, the Liberal leader in the House of Lords. Disraeli, who had spent two days closely advising Victoria on his successor after he resigned on April 21, told her to call for Hartington. After Hartington said he could not form a government without Gladstone as a minister, Victoria instructed him to ask Gladstone to see if he would serve under Hartington. Gladstone was “stunned” he should have even been asked: surely it was obvious, after his stellar oratorical performance in the election, that he had the confidence of the people and should be PM. Reluctantly (because he had opposed the law that made her Empress of India), Victoria then turned to Granville, Gladstone’s close friend. He told her Gladstone was supported by the British public and assured her that the Grand Old Man was unlikely to lead for more than a year.
Devoid of other alternatives, on April 23, Victoria grumpily summoned Gladstone to Windsor. He said, pointedly, later that she greeted him with “[the] perfect courtesy from which she never deviates.” Gladstone informed her he wanted to be both prime minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, which she considered excessive but did not challenge. Victoria then chastised him for some of the “very strong language” he used against Disraeli during his Scottish campaigns, and she unsuccessfully tried to have Hartington appointed Secretary of State for War. Five days later, her private secretary, Ponsonby, told her Gladstone wanted to appoint the Radical Joseph Chamberlain and the republican Sir Charles Dilke to his Cabinet. Victoria told Ponsonby firmly that she had to be “reassured about the views of both” before she would consent to their being made ministers. She had already given Ponsonby an extraordinary list of instructions for Gladstone—that he must not change the foreign policy, nor the British rule in India, cut projected spending, or bring in “democratic leaning.” Still, wrote Gladstone after his awkward meeting with the monarch, “All things considered, I was much pleased.”
On that cold night when they met at Windsor, the stars were particularly bright. As the wind stirred the trees below her windows, Victoria stared at Gladstone’s craggy face, wondering how long he might be fit to occupy his post. He was seventy, ten years older than Victoria, but in full vigor and energy—unlike Disraeli, then seventy-five, who had suffered from bad health throughout his entire prime ministerial term. Still, she asssured Disraeli that Gladstone looked “very ill, very old and haggard, and his voice feeble,” and that he had told her twice that he would not be in office long—a promise that was not kept.
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Disraeli could have done little to prevent his defeat. The mood of the country had shifted, and his victory at the Treaty of Berlin was already forgotten. The British had won recent battles in Afghanistan and South Africa in a bid to maintain and expand their enormous empire, but at great cost, with many bloody losses in battles. But more importantly, the economy had slowed after three decades of uninterrupted growth. In 1877, unemployment was 4.7 percent; by 1879, it had risen to 11.4 percent. Farmers were struggling, but Disraeli refused to introduce the measures of protection that had been rolled back in the first few years of Victoria’s reign, and that neighboring countries had reinstated. Disraeli wrote to Lord Lytton, “The distress of this country is the cause & the sole cause of the fall of the government over wh. I presided.” He was publicly sanguine but privately deflated, and tired.
Gladstone had also waged a staggering, unprecedented campaign strategy. In what became known as the Midlothian campaign, he pioneered American-style electioneering in Scotland, directly addressing crowds of thousands in a series of mass public meetings. He spoke in rousing, thunderous oratory, attacking Disraeli, focusing particularly on his “pestilent” foreign policy, which he saw as stamping on the rights of small countries to determine their fate. Ten thousand Zulus in Africa had been killed, Gladstone thundered, “for no other offence than their attempt to defend against your artillery with their naked bodies, their hearths and homes, their wives and families.” He also spoke of “the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan.” Gladstone argued for virtue in foreign policy—meaning less intervention—and thereby tapped into the mood of fatigue among the electorate.
Gladstone preached a gentler colonialism, supporting the principles of local autonomy and self-government—the same position he favored for Ireland. Gladstone even vowed to give independence to the South African Transvaal, which had been annexed by Britain in 1877. He was wary of further expansion in Africa and the Pacific, and called brutally obtained new swaths of land “false phantoms of glory.” Victoria was furious: she saw wars as a necessary means of protecting her empire. She dismissed Gladstone as “an American stumping orator” and was personally insulted by his attacks on foreign policy for which she thought she shared ownership with Disraeli. But hordes came to hear Gladstone speak—one crowd in Edinburgh was twenty thousand strong—and reports of his speeches spread rapidly. His niece was tickled to observe him on his return, uncharacteristically “a little personally elated.” Disraeli—whom Victoria had elevated to the House of Lords as the Earl of Beaconsfield in August 1876—refused to read his opponent’s speeches.
So it was: the Grand Old Man of England became its leader again. “The downfall of Beaconsfieldism,” he wrote, “is like the vanishing of some magnificent castle in an Italian romance.” He had vanquished his great rival. What Gladstone lacked, however, was a detailed plan. He had been so intent on undoing Disraeli he had neglected to form a detailed legislative agenda of his own.
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The elect
ion loss sapped an already fatigued Disraeli. In the spring of 1881, he was struck again by bronchitis. When he lay ill in his house in London, wrapped in a red dressing gown and attended by his homeopath, Victoria sent doctors and daily bouquets of his favorite primroses. When he was asked if the queen should visit, Disraeli retorted, “No, it is better not. She would only ask me to take a message to Albert.”
Benjamin Disraeli died calmly in the hour before dawn. It was April 19, a year after he’d lost the election. John Brown was the one who told the queen, and was especially regretful as Disraeli had always treated him with respect. Victoria summoned Disraeli’s loved secretary, Montagu Corry, and questioned him for hours about her “truest kindest friend’s” final moments. Even Gladstone said the most “extraordinary man” in England, perhaps Europe, had passed. The flamboyant statesman had not wanted a state funeral; he asked only to be buried quietly next to his wife, Mary Anne, at his home at Hughenden. Gladstone saw this as another annoying affectation, saying, “As he lived so he died. All display without reality or genuineness.” But Victoria understood. The sweet little primrose had become a symbol of what she considered their shared distaste for excess. Both lived in homes drenched with fancy blooms, yet both praised the humble primrose. She sent bunches of them to his funeral, with a card labeled “his favorite flowers from Osborne.” Gladstone rolled his eyes. (He insisted Disraeli preferred lilies and had only been humoring the queen.)
Their names will always be twinned as the greatest modern political rivalry in Britain: Gladstone and Disraeli, the Lion and the Unicorn. Disraeli had been bitter about Gladstone to the end, and missed few opportunities to attack him. When Gladstone sat to write a tribute to his rival in Parliament after his death, he had an attack of diarrhea. Giving that speech, he later told a friend, was one of the worst experiences of his life. Gladstone’s problem was his strong streak of honesty: what he really wanted to say was that a fraudulent Disraeli had exploited “the weak side” of Victoria’s subjects. Still, Victoria briefly softened toward him as a result of his kind words about her friend.
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Forty years after she was made queen, at sixty Victoria was finally certain of herself. Now a firm Tory, she scoffed at what she saw as the softness and incompetence of Gladstone’s Cabinet. It was not she who had changed, she told herself, but the parties: the Liberals had drifted to socialism, while the Conservatives were true liberals and true defenders of the empire. Disraeli had continued to correspond with her in his yearlong retirement, writing a total of twenty-two letters. Most of this correspondence was personal, but once he strayed into unconstitutional territory. In January 1881, Victoria objected to words contained in her Speech from the Throne—text that had been given to her to read aloud, by Gladstone’s office—that declared British soldiers would leave Kandahar. She would not deliver the speech with those words contained in it; her ministers would not present it without them. After a heated Cabinet meeting at Osborne, several ministers threatened to resign. A furious Victoria said she had not been treated with “such want of respect” in all her years as queen. She glared stonily at her Cabinet, recording how they “nearly tumbled over each other going out.”
The subject of the dispute was an important one—whom did the queen speak for when she opened Parliament? When Sir William Harcourt, the home secretary, told her the speech was really “the Speech of the Ministers,” her rage grew. Disraeli contradicted Harcourt and assured her—incorrectly—that his claim was “a principle not known to the British Constitution” and “only a piece of Parliamentary gossip.” Leopold, who liked to intervene in politics, and whom Victoria thought the smartest of her children, also backed his mother, arguing it was obviously the sovereign’s speech. Victoria finally agreed to give the speech as it was, while condemning the paragraph on Afghanistan in a letter to Gladstone. It was another instance of her asserting her authority, but not getting her way.
It was no simple feat to coax a single-minded sovereign out of solemn seclusion. To Disraeli Victoria owed her resurgence as a politically active monarch, which may in the end have been his greatest revenge against Gladstone. She was reenergized and now convinced of her right to interfere in politics, and had stopped talking about her work as a great burden. She even threatened her ministers with greater intervention than the Constitution allowed. She told Granville in June 1881, “A Constitutional Sovereign at best has a most difficult task, and it may become almost an impossible one, IF things are allowed to go on as they have done of late years.”
While the role of the monarch in British politics dwindled to one of constitutional consigliere as the franchise was expanded and the House of Commons grew in influence, Victoria continued to demand space. The fact that she had been encouraged to respect her own judgment just before she inherited a new prime minister with mostly opposing views created the perfect conditions for battle. Unsurprisingly, the Grand Old Man of British politics (GOM) thought Disraeli had “over-educated [his] pupil a little.” When the queen insisted upon intimate details of Cabinet meetings, as Disraeli had given her in the past, Gladstone thought it “intolerable.”
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As the queen jostled for power and demanded to be heard, British women were also growing more restless and began arguing for the right to their own incomes, to divorce on the same terms as men, to protection from violence, and to shared custody of their children. (For most of the century, men were given full custody of children if they divorced or separated from their wives.) Victoria little understood the torment, because she had no need to—and little interest in or sympathy with it. Her own private struggles, and those of her children, consumed her.
Unknotting the idea that women were the property of their husbands took decades. Until 1870 all of the money women earned belonged to their husbands, and until 1882 their property did too, even after a divorce or separation. According to the centuries-old principle of coverture, English law saw a wife not as a separate entity but a “femme covert,” who was under the “protection and influence of her husband, her baron or lord.” The status of a wife, in other words, was that of a servant. The Second Married Women’s Property Act of 1882 established wives as distinct entities—“femme sole”—who could own, inherit, and rent property and represent themselves in a court of law. Gradually women won more rights to care for their children after divorce; from 1886 the welfare of the children could be taken into account when determining if women could have some (limited) custody over their children.
The first bill for women’s suffrage was debated in Parliament in 1870. It was soundly defeated, but there was a small victory—women who owned property were allowed to stand for election to school boards. (Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the first woman to qualify as a doctor in Britain—in 1865—stood and was elected to her local board five years later.) Activist Emmeline Pankhurst formed the Women’s Franchise League in 1889 with her barrister husband Richard, with the aim of procuring the vote for women in local elections. (The Pankhursts had a rare egalitarian marriage, and their three daughters, Christabel, Sylvia, and Adela, all became influential suffragettes.)
Victoria had no sympathy for suffragettes. She wrote to Albert’s biographer, the Scottish poet Theodore Martin, “The Queen is most anxious to enlist every one who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of ‘Women’s Rights,’ with all its attendant horrors, on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feeling and propriety.” She remarked of one woman, Lady Amberley, who had attended a women’s suffrage event, that she “ought to get a good whipping.” “Let woman be what God intended,” she snorted, “a helpmate for a man—but with totally different duties and vocations.”
The deceptive part of being queen was that, while the job was the same as that of king, it sounded like a female position and therefore seemed appropriate. Victoria supported women’s being “sensibly educated” and “employed whenever they can be usefully,” but not their entering the serious professions or vot
ing. Throughout her life, Victoria was a paradox: a model of female authority in a culture preoccupied with female domesticity. And, tellingly, four out of five of the queen’s daughters became advocates of women’s rights.
Victoria described herself, conveniently, as “anomalous.” She protested that women should not hold power, all while being increasingly vigilant about the protection of her own power. She did, after all, chortle when Lord Dufferin told her a group of women had argued they should be given the vote because “men were seldom fit for the work.” Lord Dufferin may as well have been talking about her attitude toward Bertie—Victoria considered herself far more capable of leadership and political work than her eldest son, and the idea of abdicating for his sake was anathema to her.
The idea of young girls in the dissecting room, confronted by body parts “that could not be named in front of them,” made the queen queasy. She and Gladstone agreed for once: the idea of training women as doctors was “repulsive.” (She did, though, support women training to be obstetricians or to work with poor female patients in India, whose religion prevented them seeking medical advice from men.)
The queen reserved a peculiar scorn for women who were “fast,” especially those who engaged in traditionally masculine activities like hunting game. When Lady Charles Kerr fractured her skull while riding a horse, Victoria considered it a teachable moment. She wrote to Vicky in 1872: