Victoria

by Julia Baird

  The day after Gladstone gave his last, rousing speech in the House of Commons, he went to Windsor with his wife, Catherine, for dinner with the queen and stayed the night. The next morning, Catherine went to see Victoria, sobbing throughout their meeting. She wanted to try to repair the relationship, she wanted to assure her strangely fragile husband that the rancor between him and the queen would not fester or be widely known. She asked Victoria twice to understand that her husband was devoted to her, “whatever his errors.” Then, wrote Victoria, Catherine “begged me to allow her to tell him that I believed it which I did; for I am convinced it is the case, though at times his actions might have made it difficult to believe.” Catherine was clever; she shared memories of Albert, and of how long they had all known one another. Victoria wrote: “I kissed her when she left.”

  After all the decades of conflict, Gladstone was haunted by the queen’s rudeness to him when he resigned. He could not fathom why she dismissed him with the “same brevity” used in “settling a tradesman’s bill.” He wrote on March 10, 1894, in his diary that in his relationship with the queen there was “something of a mystery, which I have not been able to fathom, and probably never shall.” He wanted his family to “keep in the background” his poor relationship with the queen in their later years. At least now he was free from any obligation to talk to her.

  Victoria had not bothered to ask Gladstone who should replace him. She chose Lord Rosebery, a moderate Liberal who was bashful, anxious, and imperialistic. Most gratifyingly, he had assured Victoria he would not argue for Home Rule. After an initial tussle over his desire to introduce bills to disestablish the Welsh and Scottish churches, they had an amicable relationship. The queen’s clarity and decisiveness took the new prime minister aback. Aged forty-six, he was substantially younger than the queen, a reversal of the dynamic of previous years. His government was largely ineffective, with a divided Cabinet and a series of social reforms quickly dismissed by the House of Lords. The government lasted only until June of the next year. Victoria was sad to see him go. Unusually, she even preferred Rosebery personally to the Tory leader, Lord Salisbury, with whom she was more usually politically aligned. But at the 1895 election, the Tories had a thumping win. Victoria’s party of preference was back in power.

  —

  At the core of the queen’s world were her children and grandchildren, and she remained preoccupied with their lives. She delighted in the little grandchildren who crawled under her legs and flashed dimpled smiles; her love for small children, wrote Arthur Ponsonby, was now “all embracing.” She was now known as “the Grandmother of Europe”: her descendants thronged the courts of the Continent, and would go on to populate the royal houses of Germany, Russia, Spain, Greece, Romania, Portugal, and Norway. The beautiful Princess Alix of Hesse, Alice’s daughter, agreed to marry the Czarevitch Nicholas of Russia. Three weeks before the wedding in 1894, she was hurled into public view when her husband’s father, the Russian czar, died. She and her husband, now the czar, and their children would later die in the Russian Revolution.

  It always seemed bitterly unfair to Victoria to bury a grandchild, and especially an heir. But on January 14, 1892, Bertie lost his eldest child, Prince Albert Victor, known as Eddy, to pneumonia. Eddy was only twenty-seven and was due to marry his cousin, Princess Mary of Teck, in just a few weeks (he had wanted to marry another cousin, Alix of Hesse, but she had rejected him). Eddy’s younger brother George grew close to Mary in their grief, and he married her himself in June. (In 1910, he became King George V.) Alix and Bertie were devastated by the loss of their good-looking, genial son; Alix kept a shrine to him for the rest of her life. It was the second child she had buried, as their youngest had died only twenty-four hours after his birth. Eddy’s death has been the subject of unfounded or unproven gossip for a century. In his lifetime, he was rumored to have been a client of a homosexual brothel, the father of an illegitimate child, as well as, scandalously, Jack the Ripper. (More than a hundred men have been linked to the gruesome murders of prostitutes in London in 1888, around the impoverished Whitechapel district, but the killer has never been identified. The accusation that it was Eddy has been disproved.)

  —

  As Victoria’s carriage rolled out of the palace gates during her Golden Jubilee celebration in 1887, a tall, thin Indian man with intense eyes stood watching at a window. Abdul Karim had been invited to serve the now sixty-eight-year-old queen during her Jubilee year; he would quickly, forcefully charm his way into her affections. Karim, then just twenty-four, would represent the best of empire to Victoria; he spoke to her of the rich traditions in India, the “jewel in her crown,” describing his country’s curious culture and history. He also taught her his language and cooked her delicious curries.

  It would be an excellent way to mark her Jubilee, she decided: employ some Indian servants at her residences. After all, she had been Empress of India for more than a decade, and she would need assistance with the bevy of Indian royals who would be arriving to celebrate the Jubilee. Karim, a jail clerk from Agra, was thrilled by the invitation and spent months cramming on court etiquette. He arrived at Windsor three days before the Jubilee began, along with the plump and pleasant Mohammed Buksh, their trunks neatly packed with colorful silk tunics. When the two nervous men met Victoria, they kissed her feet. She described Karim as “much lighter” than Buksh, “tall & with a fine serious countenance,” and added that his father was a “native doctor at Agra.”

  These well-mannered, respectful men perfectly matched what Victoria wanted in her aides; discretion, devotion, and cheer. Their progress was rapid. A few days after they arrived, she wrote, “The Indians always wait now, & do so, so well & quietly.” Karim engaged her in long conversations about his exotic homeland. He charmed her, and his duties broadened. And yet he had never intended to come to serve as a mere table servant, he told her. He was ambitious and wanted more. Victoria was readily persuaded to promote him, writing in her journal in August: “It was a mistake to bring him over as a servant to wait at table, a thing he had never done, having been a clerk or munshi in his own country, and being of rather a different class to the others.” That month, Karim began teaching her Hindustani. This, she wrote, “interests & amuses me very much.” By December, she was trying to speak a little of it to visiting Indian royals. (Henry Ponsonby wrote archly to his wife: “She has given me a Hindu vocabulary to study.”) When Karim went on leave to India, she missed him, writing that he was “very handy and useful in many ways.”

  Leaping several rungs of the court ladder at once, the proud Karim was made the queen’s official Munshi, or clerk, in 1888. All photographs taken of him serving her meals were destroyed. It was only five years since Brown had died, and Karim’s rapid elevation infuriated the royal household. He lacked Brown’s integrity and long record of service, and he was far more adept at manipulating his mistress while gaining favors for himself and his family. Victoria gave him a vast tract of land in Agra as well as a furnished bungalow at Windsor and cottages at Osborne and Balmoral. Karim also procured promotions and invitations to prestigious functions for his father and brother in India. He was decorated with the high honor of the Companion of the Most Eminent Order of the Indian Empire, usually awarded to those whose work was of national importance. Puffed up by his success, Karim made increasingly outrageous requests. He asked, for example, for “enormous quantities” of narcotic drugs, including morphine and laudanum, to be sent to his father. It was an amount of poison Victoria’s doctor Sir James Reid estimated to be sufficient to kill fifteen thousand men. An emissary was dispatched to explain Reid’s refusal to the Munshi.

  Partly due to the fact that her charge was far from home, Victoria fretted over every detail of Karim’s care. The fact that she grew so quickly and trustingly attached to him underscores the loneliness of a mother whose children were fully grown and married, and whose closest male companions—Albert, Brown, and Disraeli—had all died. A reluctant Reid was entrusted w
ith the care of the Indian servants, and Victoria sent him lengthy missives about their attire, activities, and health. She worried that the cold climate might have been responsible for Karim’s battles with scabies and a carbuncle. When Karim lay ill in his room, Victoria visited him frequently throughout the day and sat stroking his hand. The increasingly suspicious Reid—who is the most detailed, if jaundiced, documenter of this relationship—noted the hours Victoria spent “in his room taking Hindustani lessons, signing her boxes, examining his neck, smoothing his pillows, etc.”

  The queen had rapidly and unilaterally ushered unknown Muslim staff into the upper echelons of her monarchy. The case of Abdul Karim highlights her loyalty, her abhorrence of racism, and her kindness, as well as her susceptibility to charm and her blinding need for intimacy. As the second intimate companion of the queen who had shot up from a lower class, Karim was soon seen as John Brown’s successor. But Victoria was forty-four years older than Karim, and far more maternal toward him. She also believed in him, and she took his word when it should have been doubted. It would not be long before, once again, her sanity would be questioned.

  CHAPTER 28

  The “Poor Munshi”

  The Queen seems off her head.

  —SIR JAMES REID

  Things have come to such a pass that the police have been consulted….But it is of no use, for the Queen says that it is “race prejudice” & that we are all jealous of the poor Munshi (!).

  —FRITZ PONSONBY

  With one deliberate sweep of her arm, Victoria pushed all the trinkets, photos, inkstands, and papers on her desk onto the carpet. She drew herself up and exhaled loudly. All she had wanted was to take her Munshi with her to southern France—after all, he had traveled with them to Italy before—and now her household had staged a revolt. Either the Munshi went, the gentlemen told her, or they did. They refused to be in a situation where he would eat with the household. It was 1897, ten years after Karim had joined the court on the eve of Victoria’s Golden Jubilee; in the intervening decade, Victoria had drawn closer and closer to her Indian aide, and tensions were boiling. Dr. Reid even made an ally of the Prince of Wales, speaking to Bertie about “the crisis which the Queen’s treatment of, and relations with,” the Munshi was bringing on. Victoria’s particular brand of stubborn loyalty was something she’d possessed since childhood. Now in her seventies, she would not be dictated to. What seemed to escape her was that Karim was the one who was bullying her, not the men of the household. She was constantly fretting that he be happy and not leave her. Lord Salisbury attributed this attachment to Victoria’s craving for some kind of excitement, which was all too rare in the life of an elderly queen. She won, and Karim came to France for the spring holiday.

  By the early 1890s, Karim had become a fixture at court. In 1893, he went to India on leave for six months and brought his wife back with him to England. Two other “wives,” whom Karim called “aunts,” followed, along with other relatives. (Dr. Reid noted that each time he went to tend to an ill “Mrs. Abdul Karim,” a different tongue was presented to him.) Karim’s sexual promiscuity resulted in his experiencing recurring bouts of venereal disease, which Dr. Reid seemed to take some pleasure in reporting to the queen. Karim had gonorrhea, he told Her Majesty solemnly at least twice, recording how taken aback Victoria was. Albert would have shuddered, but Victoria tolerated it.

  The Munshi was not popular at court. Victoria saw him as vulnerable and proud; those around her saw him as pretentious and affected. Ponsonby thought him a fat fool. Bertie loathed him but was not brave enough to confront his mother, and conferred with Dr. Reid instead. Dr. Reid distrusted him and thought he was exploiting the queen’s kindness. In 1894, while sitting in his room in Italy, accompanying the queen on her Continental vacation, Dr. Reid compiled a list of the things that annoyed him most about Karim, who had also joined their traveling group. The list included Karim’s complaints about the position of his railway carriage, his desire (backed by the queen) to ride with men of the household, the expense of his trip to Rome, the fact that he commandeered a bathroom meant for the queen’s maids, and his complaints that the Italian newspapers “took too little notice of him,” which the queen ensured was passed on to newspaper editors so they might report on him more.

  Karim continually fought to be recognized as a member of the royal household and to be included among the gentry, much to the horror of Victoria’s entourage. John Brown had had a strong disregard for status, and was more of a leveler than a self-promoter, but Karim longed to climb the hierarchy. In 1889, when he found himself seated alongside servants at a gala performance at Sandringham, he rose from his seat and walked out. The queen—true to her pattern of placating him when he was upset—assured him this would not happen again. When Victoria’s son Arthur saw Karim mingling with gentry at the Braemar races, he complained to Ponsonby. In 1894, Karim stormed out of the wedding of two of Victoria’s grandchildren in Coburg when he noticed he was standing beside some grooms. Karim immediately wrote a letter to the queen so harsh that it made Victoria burst into tears. She capitulated to his demands, and from that moment, the young clerk from Agra was driven about Prince Albert’s hometown in a royal carriage, with a footman perched on the box. He was also invited to all state concerts, but, as Dr. Reid wrote, “everyone avoided him.” The court circle had become genuinely concerned about the manipulative Karim’s hold over the queen, and about what she might compromise, given her need for companionship.

  Despite the internal court tensions, and the skepticism about the new and vain object of her affections, these years contained a certain contentment for the septuagenarian Victoria. She returned from her travels full of animated chatter. She roared at the funny anecdotes told by her ladies-in-waiting, with whom she increasingly dined alone (instead of with the entire royal household, plus politicians and dignitaries). Unlike the mournful years following Albert’s death, she was unfailingly uplifted by the beauty of her surroundings: “The lights so lovely on the purple hills, golden birches, interspersed with still perfectly green trees.” She fluttered enthusiastically about the tableaux vivants performed for her entertainment, wherein the members of the royal household would dress in the costumes of historical or theatrical characters and pose silently as curtains were drawn back to reveal a detailed, frozen scene. The tableaux were prepared in high secrecy, with many hours of rehearsing and posing for photographs. Victoria loved them, and dozens of tableaux were created, in the images of the likes of Queen Elizabeth and Raleigh, the Queen of Sheba, Carmen, and The Winter’s Tale. Karim and Mohammed were eager participants in this elaborately styled performance art, dressing up and posing alongside Victoria’s children and companions.

  —

  The first chink in the Munshi’s persona appeared in 1894 when it became clear he had exaggerated his status. Karim had claimed his father was the surgeon general of the British army in India, but when Dr. Reid discovered that he was just an unqualified hospital assistant, he became determined to expose him. In 1894, after lengthy investigations, four men of the royal household, including Dr. Reid, produced a report declaring Karim to be of low birth and socially fraudulent. In response, Victoria launched an onslaught against what she correctly saw as class snobbery: “To make out that the poor good Munshi is so low is really outrageous & in a country like England quite out of place….She has known 2 Archbishops who were sons respectively of a Butcher & a Grocer.” She was “so sorry,” she wrote, for “the poor Munshi’s sensitive feelings.” Dr. Reid was instructed to cease his investigations, and further evidence that the Munshi’s father was just an apothecary was denied and ignored.

  With good reason, Victoria suspected that part of the horror and suspicion with which Karim was regarded was the result of racism. (One of the complaints Dr. Reid repeated in his report, for example, was about the Munshi’s wife and mother-in-law: “More degraded and dirty than the lowest labourers in England; spitting all over the carpets. Performing functions in sitting room
s, etc.”) It was crucial to stamp out prejudice, decided the queen, who herself was remarkably free of it. She forbade people to use the term “black men”; even Lord Salisbury got in trouble for it. Priests had assured her that Muslims, even though non-Christian, could contain the spirit of Christ, and she instructed those around her accordingly. For all of Victoria’s conservatism about women’s rights, she was remarkably progressive in these other ways. But Karim himself exhibited much of the prejudice she hated, and of which she saw him as a victim. He acted superior to his fellow countrymen, and on the trip to Italy in 1894, he refused “to allow other Indians in any part of the same railway carriage as himself.”

  Attacks on the Munshi only caused the queen to pull him closer. The astute Henry Ponsonby watched with despair as he clambered ever higher in the queen’s affections, writing: “The advance of the Black Brigade [Karim] is a serious nuisance. I was afraid that opposition would intensify her desire to advance further. Progression by antagonism.” Karim was given John Brown’s old room, and his portrait was painted against a background of gold. In October 1889, Victoria had even taken him up to the remote cottage called Glassalt Shiel in Balmoral, despite having sworn she would never spend a night there again after Brown died.

  In June of 1889, when one of Victoria’s jeweled brooches went missing, she accused her dresser of failing to pin it on her shawl. The dresser insisted she had indeed pinned it, but no search turned the brooch up. A few weeks later, Mahomet, the other Indian servant who had been hired at the time of the Jubilee, revealed that it had been stolen and sold by Karim’s brother-in-law Hourmet Ali to a local Windsor jeweler. The queen was furious when shown the evidence by one of her dressers, Mrs. Tuck. But she was not angry with Ali—she was angry with Mrs. Tuck and the jeweler, yelling, “That is what you English call justice!” After Karim told her Ali was only following an Indian custom to pick up and pocket lost items without saying anything, Victoria instructed all involved to remain silent, insisting she believed in Ali’s honesty. Dr. Reid wrote with a sigh: “So the theft, though proved absolutely, was ignored and even made a virtue of for the sake no doubt of [Karim] about whom the Queen seems off her head.”