Victoria

by Julia Baird

  But Victoria ensured Brown would not be forgotten. She allowed her adoration to become public because to her, a relationship of a powerful woman with a servant could never be a marriage, or even a serious romance. She could never call him “Master”; she was his Mistress. Yet they spoke a language of a singular kind of love. Author Tom Cullen claims he found an extract from the queen’s journal, copied out by Victoria and sent to Hugh Brown (John’s brother) after John Brown died. She revealed that Brown had pledged to care for her until he died, saying, “You haven’t a more devoted servant than Brown.” Victoria continued: “Afterwards so often I told him no one loved him more than I did or had better friend than me: and he answered ‘Nor you—than me. No one loves you more.’ ”

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  In 1884, a year after Brown died, Victoria was still glum, fretting about turmoil in India, Egypt, and Ireland, convinced that life “does become sadder and sadder and harder.” Then she was told her hemophiliac son Leopold had fallen in Cannes and injured his knee. Shortly afterward, he convulsed and died of a brain hemorrhage. His wife was then expecting their second child. Victoria’s grief was assuaged by the fact that she knew how unhappy Leopold had been, after a “succession of trials and sufferings” and tormented by “such a restless longing for what he cld not have,” which had only increased as he grew older. An intense, troubled intellectual, Leopold yearned to lead a normal life but was stifled by his mother’s protectiveness and frustrated that his illness gave her constant cause for anxiety. His existence was miserable—bruising easily, being held in contempt by some in the court, and even cruelly bullied by John Brown and his brother. He was considered to be “very ugly” and awkward by his vigilant mother. He died just ten days before his thirtieth birthday.

  Hemophilia was poorly understood in the 1800s, though it had been the subject of extensive research, especially in Germany. Few hemophiliacs survived into adulthood; the median life expectancy was only eleven. Death could result from a fall from a horse or a chair, or the pulling of teeth. It could result from the slightest injury: a barber died after scratching his nose with scissors, as did a baby who sliced its lip on a cigar holder in 1860. Childhood games could be fatal; children died from bruises as well as cuts. In the face of medical impotence, the life of a parent of a hemophiliac was one of ceaseless vigilance, guilt, and worry. “No one knows the constant fear I am in about him,” wrote Victoria, who ensured she was always near her son.

  In 1868, when Leopold was fifteen and was recovering from another hemorrhage, the British Medical Journal published a leading article that argued Leopold should not engage in strenuous exertion. It was thought that he had “weak veins” or some kind of male menstruation; it was not until 1891 that researchers showed that the blood of hemophiliacs took longer to clot. Victoria followed the best experts, who advocated healthy food, attention to hygiene, avoidance of violent boyhood games, and rest. So Leopold devoured towers of books, earning the title “the Scholar Prince.”*3 He had forceful, conservative views on politics; Victoria would miss them.

  As he grew older, Leopold tried desperately to assert his independence. In 1878, when he was twenty-five, he refused to travel north to Balmoral with his mother and went to Europe instead. To Gladstone, it appeared as though he wanted to either “live or die hard.” He wanted to find a wife and live like a normal man. Marriage for hemophiliacs was taboo and extremely rare then—there were concerns about offspring, as well as longevity and the ability to earn an income. Leopold’s doctor was of the firm view that marriage should not be entertained because of the prospect of passing on “so dreadful an entail of disease.”

  Victoria knew that for her fragile son to marry was “such a risk and experiment,” but she allowed it. In April 1882, he married the redoubtable, plucky Princess Helena of the German state of Waldeck. The night before the wedding, he had slipped on an orange peel and bled dangerously. On his wedding day, his mother watched him closely, “still lame and shaking,” “on the most important day of his life.” For the first time in forty-two years, Victoria wore her white wedding veil over her black garments. Now, less than two years later, Leopold was dead and she wore only black, again.

  * * *

  *1 Once a woman had “fallen” into prostitution, it was frequently asserted that an early death was inevitable. One expert estimated that after women decided to “turn a trick” in Victorian England, they had, on average, only four years left to live. According to the admission registers of the Lock Hospital in Edinburgh, nine out of ten prostitutes “disappeared by the age of thirty.” For many young women, it was just a temporary occupation before marriage.

  *2 This was just before Gladstone died in 1898. As the biographer H.C.G. Matthew concludes, it was a “precise and obviously qualified declaration,” a statement that was not used by his son Herbert when he was later defending his father’s reputation in court in 1927 against libelous suggestions made by Captain Peter E. Wright that Gladstone had spoken “language of the highest and strictest principle” in public, while in private it was his practice “to pursue and possess every sort of women.” Herbert’s lawyers thought the reservation implicit in the statement might suggest to the jury that Gladstone’s relationships with the dozens of sex workers he befriended were in fact not entirely innocent. The court confirmed Gladstone’s moral character.

  *3 Leopold’s condition—which in the 1860s was already described as “weak veins”—provoked a broader, important discussion about the cause and treatment of hemophilia. From the 1870s, the British royal family was acutely aware that their bloodline was being questioned, and Victoria continued to insist she had not inherited any such affliction. Cases of spontaneous mutation—or de novo cases—were entirely mysterious. (Stephen Pemberton, The Bleeding Disease: Hemophilia and the Unintended Consequences of Medical Progress [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011], 35.) The only hypothesis with any evidence was intermarriage, according to a treatise published by John Wickham Legg in 1872. There is no record of this being discussed with Victoria, and given that genetics was not properly understood until the end of the nineteenth century, it is unlikely that a conversation took place.

  CHAPTER 26

  “Two Ironclads Colliding”: The Queen and Mr. Gladstone

  Mein Gott! That was a woman! One could do business with her!

  —OTTO VON BISMARCK

  Sometimes the oddest of men make the greatest of heroes. A thin, shabbily dressed man, General Charles George Gordon was widely viewed as arrogant and deluded. As a young boy, he amused himself by playing pranks on his schoolmates, and fantasized about being a eunuch. As a military cadet, he bullied his juniors by beating them with hairbrushes or brooms. By the time he was a lieutenant in the British army, he was a fanatically devout Christian who eschewed material comforts, insisted on low pay, and longed to die. He had fought in the Crimean War, he said, hoping to be killed. As with Napoleon III, Gordon’s penetrating blue-gray eyes were thought to be the secret to the mysterious control he exerted over large swaths of men, especially, in his case, opposing tribal forces in China and Africa. When not at war, Gordon tended to the sick and poor in workhouses in Kent and rescued street urchins. He also had an unexplained and possibly dubious predilection for the company of boys.

  This eccentricity was no obstacle to Gordon’s celebrity. In the middle of the century, as Victoria fretted over the Eastern Question and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Gordon played a crucial role in quashing the Taiping Rebellion in China, a brutal civil war that ran from 1850 to 1864, in which at least twenty million people died. The man who led the “Ever Victorious Army,” which was composed of Chinese soldiers, to a series of wins became known as “Chinese Gordon,” and his name would become the stuff of imperial legend.

  In 1882, despite Gladstone’s reluctance, the British had occupied Egypt, which was then nominally a Turkish province. The British policy was somewhat muddled, but the initial intention was to help the Egyptian throne fend off a military m
utiny and economic ruin, as well as to protect the Suez Canal and the British investments made in Egypt after it opened in 1869. Not long after, in neighboring Sudan, a charismatic mystic emerged and declared a holy war for independence from that nation’s Turko-Egyptian rule. The mystic called himself Muhammad al-Mahdi—the Islamic Messiah. In 1883, the Sudanese government tried to quash him, but failed. The Egyptian forces there were not strong enough to repel the rebels, and it soon became clear the Egyptians in the Sudan would need to be evacuated, along with any British citizens. Gladstone’s Cabinet equivocated about intervening. The queen did not. She wanted to crush the Mahdi underfoot, but others, especially Liberals like Gladstone, wanted all troops withdrawn.

  General Gordon seemed an unlikely candidate to solve this quandary. Now fifty-one, his fame had faded, and he was due to go to the Congo, where he suspected—or hoped—he might die. Politicians who publicly admired him called him deranged in private. Gladstone’s secretary, E. W. Hamilton, called him a “half cracked fatalist.” Sir Robert Hart, a British consular official in China, decided he was “not all there.” But after Gordon gave an interview to the notorious publisher W. T. Stead about how he would manage the Sudan crisis as he had done in China—and how Sudan’s capital of Khartoum must not be abandoned, but fortified—the cry “Gordon for the Sudan” erupted in the hawkish London press.

  At first, Gladstone resisted the pressure to send Gordon on an ill-defined mission. He wanted very little to do with Egypt, preferred to abandon the Sudan altogether, and did not want to waste time or resources securing more land. Why send an aggressive adventurer to manage a retreat? Still, assuming the mission would be short, he capitulated on the grounds that Gordon could advise on strategy without executing it himself. It was a vain hope: Gordon was a maverick with a scorching disdain for authority. He thought the British Cabinet was full of charlatans, and believed he answered to a far higher authority, in heaven. Events play on us, he told his sister: “We are pianos.”

  And so the concerto began. Gordon sent a characteristically blunt telegraph to the governor in Khartoum: “Don’t be a funk. You are men, not women, I am coming. Tell the inhabitants.” He successfully managed to evacuate 2,500 women, children, and wounded before the rebelling Mahdists surrounded the city and trapped him inside. He dug in to fight. The British government spent the summer of 1884 wondering whether to send forces to rescue him; he had been told to leave the Sudan, not occupy it. Gordon was aware of his rogue status, writing in his journal on September 19: “I own to having been very insubordinate to Her Majesty’s Government and its officials, but it is my nature, and I cannot help it.” His insolence endeared him even more to the public. The Radical Cabinet member Charles Dilke, who had backed both the sending and the rescuing of Gordon, had warned in March after receiving a dozen “extraordinary” telegrams: “We [are] obviously dealing with a wild man under the influence of that climate of Central Africa which acts even upon the sanest men like strong drink.”

  Months passed as the government debated whether to send any troops, and if so of what kind and size, and by what route to send them. An irate Victoria urged Gladstone to support Gordon, whom she thought was a “most extraordinary man.” She grew extremely anxious about his safety and decided to contact her generals directly. When she was reprimanded by the war minister, Lord Hartington, she retorted: “The Queen always has telegraphed direct to her Generals, and always will do so….The Queen won’t stand dictation. She won’t be a machine.” She then directly contradicted her prime minister’s advice, telling General Wolseley, when he was sent to Khartoum, to ensure that the soldiers stayed in the Sudan. Her position at the head of the empire, she complained to Vicky, provided no pleasure, as “in spite of warning and writing, cyphering and speaking…nothing [was] done till the pistol is pointed at their breast.” She “trembled” for Gordon’s safety, she told the prime minister on February 9, 1884, as Gordon was making his way from Cairo to Khartoum: “If anything befalls him the result will be awful.”

  The siege of Khartoum began on March 13, 1884. The British army did not march to relieve him until November of that year.

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  After a siege that had lasted more than three hundred days, Gordon was killed by the Mahdists; they barbarically wedged his severed head in a tree at their camp. He had been murdered on January 26, 1885. Just two days later, the British relief expedition arrived at Khartoum. Ten days later, the news of Gordon’s death reached London. Victoria roared with rage. This was to her a deeply personal humiliation. She blamed the government: “On their heads,” she wrote to Vicky, “rests the precious blood of Gordon and thousands!” Her own conscience was clean: “I warned, urged without ceasing all in vain. [But] Mr. Gladstone…will be forever branded with the blood of Gordon that heroic man.”

  It was time, the queen decided , to take a highly irregular step. She sent a telegram en clair—so everyone could read it, it was not secret—to Gladstone; the foreign secretary, Lord Granville; and the war secretary, Lord Hartington. The stationmaster of the Carnforth Junction train station handed the telegram to the prime minister as he was racing back to London from North Lancashire—where he had been staying with the Duke of Devonshire—following the news of Gordon’s death. He unfolded it and read the queen’s harsh words: “These news from Khartoum are frightful and to think that all of this might have been prevented and many precious lives saved by earlier action is too fearful.” Incensed, Gladstone swore he would never again shadow the cobblestones of Windsor, and he considered resigning.

  A carefully crafted, firm reply was sent to the queen that night. Gladstone wrote that while he did not “presume to estimate the means of judgment possessed by Your Majesty,” according to his information and recollection, he was “not altogether able to follow the conclusion which Your Majesty has been pleased thus to announce.” In other words, she was wrong. The British forces, under Lord Wolseley, might have reached Khartoum in time to save Gordon, he wrote, if they had not been delayed by advancing by a circuitous route along the river, “upon the express application of General Gordon.” He was technically correct, but it was not exactly the point. Victoria had urged action ten months before it was taken; it was not a matter of days.

  Suffering “overaction of the bowels” again, Gladstone fell ill, his hands mottled with a rash. He went to see a play on February 19, 1885, the same day the news of his general’s death broke, and he barely mentioned Gordon in Parliament—hardly the elaborate lamentation Victoria knew Disraeli would have delivered. Gladstone was right that strategically, Khartoum meant little to the British Empire, but he was disastrously wrong about what it would mean to his party to lose a general of Gordon’s standing. The Tories were delighted that they had been so effortlessly handed this ammunition, a symbol of apparent lack of Liberal imperial ambition. The GOM, or “Grand Old Man,” nickname was flipped to MOG—Murderer of Gordon.

  By now, Gladstone was struggling to conceal his contempt for his strong-willed queen. He began Cabinet meetings by reading out Victoria’s dictums, then jammed her letters back in his pocket, saying dismissively, “And now, gentlemen, to business.” In April 1885, he called Victoria’s views “quite worthless.” What he failed to comprehend was that Victoria had an uncanny knack for speaking the mind of many of her subjects, for better or ill. She had developed better political instincts than many of her ministers. And sometimes Victoria did intervene successfully. In 1884, for example, Parliament was in gridlock over the Third Reform Bill, which extended the vote to agricultural workers. Victoria generally favored electoral reform, but she disliked the disruption it caused. She was sanguine about this bill but horrified by the calls of some Liberals for the abolition of the House of Lords. She called on Gladstone to restrain “some of his wild colleagues and followers,” and argued that the position of monarch would be “utterly untenable” if there was no balance of power left.

  Victoria had insisted the Liberals meet with the Tories, who were adamant they would p
ass the Reform Bill only if a redistribution bill was introduced at the same time. The meeting resulted in the House of Lords agreeing to pass the Reform Bill as a freshly negotiated redistribution bill was introduced into the lower house. Lord Granville praised the queen’s “powerful influence,” and Henry Ponsonby credited her for “incessant hammering at both sides to be moderate and insisting on their meeting.” When Gladstone thanked her, she responded theatrically: “To be able to be of use is all I care to live for now.” She was in her mid-sixties now and focused on her work. Victoria’s success at negotiating that compromise persuaded her of two things: the prescient possibility of creating a third, centrist party, and the effectiveness of her own influence.

  But foreign policy was one area where Victoria’s influence stalled during Gladstone’s tenure. Gladstone was naturally averse to jingoism and further expansion for expansion’s sake, but his country remained imperialist. He was reluctantly prodded into colonial wars in South and North Africa, as well as Central Asia. As his biographer Roy Jenkins wrote, Gladstone got “the worst of both worlds….From the beginning a government elected on a largely anti-imperialist platform found itself uncomfortably squelching in too many imperial quagmires.” The resulting foreign policy was incoherent—while British forces withdrew from the Transvaal in 1881, they occupied Egypt in 1882; while the Cabinet sent Gordon to rescue the British in the Sudan, they refused to rescue him when he was surrounded. In Windsor Castle, a marble bust of General Gordon sat in a corridor as a cold reminder of his death.

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  For seven excruciating months in 1884, there had been glacial silence at the royal table. From May to November, Beatrice and her mother refused to talk to each other, instead pushing notes across the table to communicate, while their knives and forks clinked against china. The large block of ice Victoria regularly had placed on the dining tables to cool the summertime air was barely needed. It was bitterly awkward, especially given their usual closeness. Victoria’s youngest child had, to this point, shown only obedience. But now she had fallen in love with the handsome Prince Henry of Battenberg, right under Victoria’s nose.*1 When the dutiful, shy twenty-seven-year-old Beatrice confessed that Prince Henry had snatched her heart, Victoria was predictably selfish and melodramatic: “Pleasure has for ever died out of my life.”