Victoria

by Julia Baird

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  Through it all, Albert was a ghostly figure conjured by the persistence of Victoria’s mourning. When the morning of June 20 broke, Victoria was, as ever, keenly aware of her solitude. She wrote in her diary: “The day has come and I am alone.” It had been twenty-five years since her husband died. An entire generation had grown up without knowing him, but still she stood there doggedly dressed in black, trying to honor him, certain that the cheers reflected an understanding of how she had suffered without him. After the Jubilee, Victoria wrote a letter thanking her subjects for her kind reception on the way to and from Westminster Abbey: “It has shown that the labor and anxiety of fifty long years, twenty-two of which I spent in unclouded happiness, shared and cheered by my beloved husband, while an equal number were full of sorrows and trials, borne without his sheltering arm and wise help, have been appreciated by my people.”

  When three million of her subjects donated to a “Women’s Jubilee Offering Fund,” raising £75,000, Victoria decided to commission yet another statue of Albert (although she gave the bulk of the money to establish the Queen’s Jubilee Nursing Institute). Thanks to Victoria, Albert abided (although she did alter some of his strict rules: she allowed women thought to be innocent parties in divorce cases to join the Jubilee; she even contemplated extending this privilege to such women from other countries, although Lord Salisbury counseled her against it “on account of the risk of admitting American women of light character”). It was a time for leniency—across the empire, prisoners were set free, except those who were cruel to animals, a sin Victoria considered unforgivable.

  As usual, Victoria’s reflections on her loneliness were made in the thick of a large crowd of relatives. She craved public expressions of love from her offspring. While reading over the speeches of her children prepared for the Jubilee, Victoria wrote to Ponsonby: “The Queen approves of these answers, but always wishes the words ‘my dear Mother’ to be inserted. Not only on this occasion, but always…the Queen wishes it should never be omitted when her children represent her.”

  The surviving seven royal children, now scattered across the globe, congregated in London to toast their mother’s long reign. Affie, now forty-two, was stationed in Malta with his family, as the commander in chief of the British fleet in the Mediterranean. Arthur, then thirty-seven, was commander in chief of the Bombay army and living happily in India with his wife—and would soon be joined by his three children. Vicky, forty-six, was living in Prussia, miserable and deeply unpopular, persecuted by a suspicious press, the anti-British Chancellor Bismarck, and her own children, especially her eldest, Wilhelm.

  The other children were still in England: Beatrice, who had just turned thirty, was pregnant with her second child and cheerfully ensconced with her new husband, Liko. When the baby girl, Ena, was born a few months later at Balmoral, Liko called her the “little Jubilee grandchild.” Louise was not yet forty, and miserable in her marriage to the Marquess of Lorne. Helena was forty-one, and deeply engrosssed with her charity work; in the year of the Jubilee, she became president of the newly founded British Nurses’ Association.

  Bertie, of whom Victoria had grown fonder in recent years, was a portly forty-five and had five children, but seemed scarcely closer to ascending the throne than he had twenty years before. W. T. Stead sniped at him in the Pall Mall Gazette: “Will the Prince of Wales, ‘the fat little bald man in red,’ who looked so unimpressive beside his splendid German brother-in-law in white, ever reign over us?” Sometimes it seemed as if Victoria was a permanent fixture on the landscape of Britain.

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  A week after the Jubilee ceremony, Vicky’s husband, Fritz, was operated on for a growth on his larynx. It was declared to be nonmalignant, and Vicky’s hopes that her husband might be cured were raised. The small lump had first been discovered in his throat in May, and several clumsy, painful attempts were made to remove it with red-hot wire, but every time it was sliced off it reappeared. Six German doctors diagnosed throat cancer, and they recommended a dangerous operation that would have resulted in Fritz’s loss of voice and could have been fatal. A British specialist, Dr. Morell Mackenzie, had rushed to Prussia to see him, at Vicky’s request. Dr. Mackenzie removed a lump from Fritz’s throat and said it was benign. The German doctors insisted something was wrong; Dr. Mackenzie took another piece out and again said it was not cancerous. Vicky was desperate to believe Dr. Mackenzie, but her reliance on an English doctor angered the locals, as well as her eldest son, Wilhelm, who began to plot to oust his father from the succession.

  Wilhelm was a proud, often cruel, and talentless man who harbored a particular kind of hatred for his mother. The painful breech birth Vicky had suffered meant he had to be wrenched from her womb, causing partial paralysis of his left arm due to nerve damage (this is now known as Erb’s palsy). This made his left arm fifteen centimeters shorter than his right, something he tried to disguise for years by resting it on swords or other props. The medical establishment was ill equipped to deal with such a disability, which was considered shameful at the time. The treatments used to try to repair his arm were horrific. One such treatment, first applied when he was a few months old, was “animal baths.” Twice a week, a hare was killed and sliced open; Wilhelm’s limp arm was slid inside the still-warm body in the hope that some of its life force would magically transfer to the baby boy. Willy was also jolted with electric shocks and strapped into a metal contraption that forced his head upright. He blamed his mother for his shame, and for his years of unsuccessful, painful treatments: he would never forgive her.

  As a militaristic conservative who favored state rule, Wilhelm believed he was the true patriot in his family. He “fancied himself of enormous importance,” Vicky told her mother. He thought he was more Prussian than his progressive father, Fritz, and was a great admirer of Bismarck and all things associated with “despotism and Police State.” Victoria was so irritated by her twenty-eight-year-old grandson’s haughtiness that she did not want to invite him to her Golden Jubilee. Vicky had to plead his case, especially as any signs of division between England and Germany would only exacerbate her own problems as a liberal British woman in conservative Germany. Willy had hoped to leave his sick father behind in Prussia and go to London on his own. From England, Victoria regarded his scheming with irritation. Even Chancellor Bismarck recognized Willy was too immature to rule, that he was impetuous, “susceptible to flattery and could plunge Germany into war without foreseeing or wishing it.” It turned out to be a matter of character, though, not maturity, for this was precisely what happened years later, when Wilhelm’s eagerness for war would far outstrip his competence at waging it.

  In November of 1887, it was determined that Fritz in fact had cancer; Dr. Mackenzie concurred at last. Willy quickly embarked on a naked grab for power, persuading the Prussian emperor—his grandfather, Fritz’s father—to authorize him to sign any documents on Fritz’s behalf. In February 1888, Fritz had a tracheotomy. By March 23, Wilhelm was deputy emperor, working at the German Foreign Office and leading a host of parliamentary committees. He prepared his proclamation speech and kept a detailed plan of his succession in his desk. Fritz knew he was already dismissed as dead; the hurt only deepened when Wilhelm’s siblings, Charlotte and Henry, switched to support their brother. Vicky complained to Victoria: “People in general consider us a mere passing shadow soon to be replaced by reality in the shape of William!” It seemed painfully unfair to Vicky that her own husband was so ill when he stood ready to inherit the throne; the emperor was now ninety, and sure to die soon. She was certain her husband would be a great, humane leader of Prussia, and a forceful advocate for parliamentary democracy.

  In March 1888, an increasingly feeble Fritz finally became Emperor Frederick when his father died. Victoria was elated that her daughter was now empress: “It does seem an impossible dream.” Victoria, by now a ruler with a half century of experience under her belt, instructed them both to be firm and to demand respect, desp
ite Fritz’s illness.

  Fritz was a voiceless emperor. He scribbled instructions on paper and breathed through a cannula while his eldest son waited impatiently for him to die. Vicky’s nerves were raw, and her neuralgia sometimes confined her to bed. She spent her days knitting or crocheting next to her husband as he pressed a bag of ice cubes to his throat, hovering outside his door to listen to him breathing, or accompanying him on carriage rides as he struggled with coughing fits. Vicky was isolated and misunderstood; her British origins had made her deeply unpopular. Her private letters were leaked to the press and published in full. All three of her children also attacked her, accusing her of causing her father’s illness or of ensuring that his medical treatment was poor. Even when Vicky smiled, it was pointed to as evidence of callousness.

  The ruling elite drummed their heels and gossiped about Vicky. Bismarck’s son Herbert considered Fritz’s looming death “good fortune”; he would be glad to be rid of a man married to a woman with a “totally English outlook” that might mean a disastrous foreign policy. The nobility, and Chancellor Bismarck, worried Fritz might try to make Vicky regent. Even the idea of Vicky signing documents for Fritz was opposed by Bismarck and her own son Henry, who said, “Hohenzollern Prussia and the German Reich must not allow themselves to be led by a woman.” The sad empress was surrounded.

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  It was time for her mother to intervene. Victoria decided she would go to Prussia on her way back from a holiday in Italy in April 1888 to see Fritz and show support. While she was there, she would confront the old statesman Bismarck, one to one. There was, simultaneously, another delicate diplomatic operation at stake. Vicky’s daughter Princess Victoria wanted to marry Prince Alexander of Battenburg—“Sandro”—who had resigned as king of Bulgaria in 1886 after a seven-year reign. Fritz had given his daughter his approval. Bismarck, whose own son had his eye on the pretty princess, strenuously objected on the grounds that it would anger Russia, especially the new czar, Alexander II, who was Sandro’s cousin. Sandro was tall, strikingly handsome, and adored by Queen Victoria, although she had cautioned Vicky to wait to get full approval. (She had also been told that Sandro had fallen in love with a particularly beautiful opera singer.)

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  When Victoria walked into Fritz’s room, he handed her a nosegay; it would be the last time she would see him. She then saw Bismarck in her rooms at Charlottenburg Palace. (Lord Salisbury urged her to bring a minister with her, but she refused.) It is unclear exactly what happened during the forty-five minutes they spent alone together, but Bismarck wiped a handkerchief across his brow when he walked out. Shortly afterward, he declared, “Mein Gott! That was a woman! One could do business with her!” A man to whom the concept of female authority was anathema, Bismarck later amended his remarks to sound more patronizing: “Grandmama behaved quite sensibly at Charlottenburg.” Poor Vicky sobbed as she said goodbye to her mother. But Victoria’s visit had been a triumph, as she had reminded the Germans of the power that their empress’s mother wielded. A jealous Willy sniffed: it was “high time the old lady died.”

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  Fritz occupied the throne for only ninety-nine days: he died on June 15, 1888. He was, by then, a “perfect skeleton.” The day before, he had written in a note to his wife: “What is happening to me?” Vicky had sat by his bed for hours, holding out a sponge soaked in white wine for him to suck on. After he drew his final breath, jamming his eyes shut, Vicky placed his sword on his arm and kissed his hands and feet. Wilhelm immediately jerked into action. His forces—scores of Hussars in scarlet coats—quickly surrounded the house. He cordoned off the telegraph office while they searched Fritz’s study for evidence of liberal plots.

  The new kaiser went to his mother’s room and ransacked it, accusing her of hiding secret documents that he believed would be sent to England. Vicky stood watching him, weeping. (She had also anticipated this: Vicky had already brought a cache of Fritz’s private papers over to England during the Golden Jubilee and hidden them in an iron safe in Buckingham Palace. Later, when Fritz realized he was dying, he had arranged for a doctor to smuggle his war diaries to the British ambassador in Berlin, eager to preserve an accurate record of the part he had played in the Franco-Prussian and Austro-Prussian wars and the unification of his homeland.) Later, when Vicky tried to walk onto the terrace to clip some roses to place on Fritz’s body, a guard grabbed her arm roughly and escorted her back in.

  Sitting alone in her room, stunned, Vicky wrote to her mother, who would understand better than anyone: “I am a widow, no more his wife. How am I to bear it? You did, and I will do.” Victoria sympathized: “I had not the agony of seeing another fill the place of my Angel Husband, wh I always felt I never cd have borne!” And the place had been filled by a son who not only ruled over her but despised her. Even his friend Herbert von Bismarck described Wilhelm as being “as cold as a block of ice. Convinced from the start that people only exist to be used…after which they may be cast aside.” Wilhelm buried his father as quickly as possible, conveniently forgetting to open his instructions for his funeral.

  The nationalistic new kaiser was deeply ambivalent about Britain, which marked a significant shift in British-German relations. He dressed in British uniform when visiting his grandmother, whom he loved, and he enthusiastically raced yachts around the Isle of Wight. But he also felt a deep rivalry, focusing on building up Prussia’s navy to try to compete with Britain’s. He would end up warring with his mother’s family, leading them to change the royal family’s name from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor in the First World War, when Britain was fighting Germany. Wilhelm dramatically snubbed Bertie, refusing to meet him in Vienna not long after becoming kaiser, because of something Bertie had said at Fritz’s funeral. Victoria was shocked, thought him obnoxious and pretentious and his wife “odious.” She only grudgingly allowed him to visit her at Osborne in 1889, where his affection and excitement about being allowed to wear a British admiral’s uniform disarmed her. Wilhelm gushed: “The same uniform as St. Vincent and Nelson; it is enough to make one quite giddy.”

  What would have happened if Fritz’s cancerous throat had not prematurely ended his life? Germany would have been under the rule of a liberal, compassionate emperor, a leader who wanted to improve the lives of the working class and who especially despised the anti-Semitic movement. “As a modern civilized man, as a Christian and a gentleman, he found it abhorrent,” wrote Vicky; he tried to counter it where he could. His son Wilhelm was the opposite, stirring up and championing anti-Semitism, writing in 1927 while in exile in the Netherlands that “press, Jews & mosquitos…are a nuisance that humanity must get rid of in some way or another. I believe the best would be gas?” The father would certainly have fought what the son fostered.

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  Democracy made no sense, Victoria declared, when it only resulted in the reelection of a man like William Gladstone. He became prime minister again in 1892, the third time in a dozen years. It was, she wrote, “a defect in our much-famed Constitution to have to part with an admirable Govt like Ld Salisbury’s for no question of any importance, or any particular reason, merely on account of the number of votes.” In the Court Circular, Victoria provocatively proclaimed the resignation of Salisbury “with regret.” It really was too much to have to call for “an old, wild incomprehensible man of eighty-two and a half.” The aging of Gladstone, her senior by a decade, galled the queen. She described him as “much aged…his face shrunk, deadly pale, with a weird look in his eye, a feeble expression about the mouth, & the voice altered.” He was bent, she pointed out, and walking on a stick. But so was she.

  The older they grew, the closer Gladstone had to sit to Victoria’s side because of his increasing deafness. They both loathed their meetings and struggled to make conversation; it had become “a farce,” said the queen. To her disdain, Gladstone tried once again to introduce “gradual self-government” for the Irish in 1893, which resulted in fistfights in the Commons. The House of Lo
rds threw it out with a resounding vote of 419 to 41. Gladstone would not live to see the Irish govern themselves.

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  On February 28, 1894, after eighteen more months as prime minister, the elderly Gladstone walked slowly up the stairs at Windsor. He steeled himself for the queen’s reaction to his resignation. He had been politically destabilized lately by his lack of support for shoring up the navy, at a time when Germany was increasing in maritime strength. But Gladstone said his decision to go was driven by his physical deterioration; he could no longer properly see or hear. The Grand Old Man and his unsympathetic queen spent an awkward half hour together, trying to drum up small talk, eventually resorting to discussing the fog and rain, as well as Victoria’s impending trip to Italy. Victoria’s relief was obvious. “I never saw her looking better,” wrote Gladstone. “She was at the high point of her cheerfulness. Her manner was personally kind throughout.” By contrast, several of his ministers wept at the news. Gladstone called them “that blubbering Cabinet.” His career had spanned six decades; he had been prime minister for a total of twelve years, and a Privy Counsellor (part of a group of politicians who advised the sovereign) for fifty-three.

  The queen’s response to Gladstone’s letter of resignation was brief and graceless. She acknowledged after “many years of arduous labor and responsibility,” he was “right in wishing to be relieved at his age of these arduous duties, and she trusts [he will] be able to enjoy peace and quiet, with his excellent and devoted wife, in health and happiness, and that his eyesight may improve.” She continued, abruptly, “The Queen would gladly have offered a peerage to Mr. Gladstone, but she knows he would not accept it.” Gladstone felt this like a slap. After so many decades, no sign of warmth? Surely she could at least offer a fragment of praise, or even just recognition? Wouldn’t his departure thaw her a jot? He likened their farewell to the end of a holiday in 1831 that he’d taken in Sicily. He had ridden around on a mule the whole time. While he had been “on the back of the beast for many scores of hours” and it had done him no wrong and rendered him “much valuable service,” Gladstone reflected, “I could not get up the smallest shred of feeling for the brute. I could neither love nor like it.”