by Julia Baird
Victoria devoured the reports that came throughout the fall of 1899, sickened by the details. The initial defeats were crushing. She recorded the context of all her discussions, dissected the frequent telegrams she received from commanders at the front, visited the wounded, studied the faces of soldiers’ wives for worry, and personally replaced the bugle of a fourteen-year-old boy who had been shot on the field. She argued vehemently, as she had during all conflicts she supported, for more troops to be sent. The siege of Ladysmith, between November 1899 and February 1900, preoccupied her for months. But her accounts of what she was told make it clear that Victoria was receiving spin and lies about the war effort, doubtless in part to lift her spirits, as well as to impress upon her the stoicism of her commanders. She was regularly told the men had done their best when they were lying dead in fields; she was told that they didn’t mind the bother of the war and were jolly well glad to be there and fight.
Even at eighty, Victoria demanded her full rights as monarch. When the Cabinet decided to replace commander in chief Lord Wolseley with Lord Roberts, she made it known she was “deeply aggrieved” she had not been told and her advice not sought. Roberts proved to be an effusive, regular correspondent to the queen, although she often upbraided him about the progress of the war. She constantly made her opinions on the conduct of the war known. She knitted too: scarves, comforters, and caps, to be sent directly to her “dear brave soldiers.” When these hotly desirable items were snapped up by her officers, she sent a hundred thousand tins of chocolate decorated with her portrait to her men on New Year’s. One tin, lodged in a haversack, deflected a bullet, saving a man’s life. An attempt was made to collect the images of every man killed in battle so that Victoria could place them in an album; she wrote to the mothers and widows of those lost. She also visited the wounded; though she had to be lifted from carriage to chair, she was determined to attend hospitals and reviews because she knew what her presence would mean to the men.
Morale was one of the queen’s primary concerns. When the temporary head of the Foreign Office, Arthur Balfour, came to see her at Windsor with dismal news of a terrible defeat in December 1899, she said plainly, “Please understand that there is no one depressed in this house; we are not interested in the possibilities of defeat; they do not exist.” Morale was also the reason why, throughout the war, Victoria resisted persistent calls for an inquiry into the conduct of the Boer War. She correctly predicted that such an inquiry could lower morale, but delaying it had the far worse side effect of covering up, and allowing to continue, the British errors and abuses that had been occurring in South Africa. She wrote:
The Queen must urge on Mr. Balfour very strongly the necessity of resisting these unpatriotic and unjust criticisms of our Generals and of the conduct of the war. If the Government are firm and courageous the country will support them….You must all show a firm front, and not let it be for a moment supposed that we vacillate in the least. An enquiry after the war itself is over can be held out, but not now. No doubt the War Office is greatly at fault, but it is the whole system which must be changed, and that cannot be just now.
Victoria worried that any problems might be reported back to the Boers and others, smearing Britain’s reputation when what they needed was cohesion and strong spirits. She was so grateful for Irish commandos fighting in the war effort that she canceled a vacation to the Continent and went to Ireland instead, her first trip there in thirty-nine years. She was also acutely conscious of race relations within the British military. The fact that Indian soldiers were “auxiliaries” mostly working at the rear of the other forces mystified and angered her. In February 1900, she pleaded with Salisbury: “Why will you not call the whole force out? It could be done….Not only have Boers invaded Zululand, but employed natives to fight against us. Surely this justifies our using Indians.”
She passed her days scouring telegrams. Lord Kitchener was sending depressing missives about the opposition to British troops in South Africa, arguing that the initial defeats the British suffered boosted the number of Boer recruits significantly. As they waited for months to see the besieged township of Ladysmith won, Victoria urged Salisbury to send more men, arguing that the government had failed to invest in increasing the numbers of armed troops since the 1870s despite her urging. She was “horrified” at the “terrible” casualties reported and insisted no movement be made without more troops. She asked: “Would it be possible to warn the young officers not to expose themselves more than is absolutely necessary?” What she did not then know was that the conflict was marked by many deaths resulting from “friendly fire”; this would have devastated her. Victoria’s last entry about the war in 1900, on December 31, was glum: “The news from South Africa was not very good. A post of our troops has been rushed by the enemy, and a gun was taken. We have, however, reoccupied the post.”
There was growing unease in Britain about the war. Anger grew in Europe and Ireland about what was seen as Britain’s unnecessary intervention. In 1900, a fifteen-year-old Italian protester tried to kill Bertie and Alix on a train in Brussels. (They were unharmed.) Then, one of Victoria’s most adored grandsons, the cricket-loving Prince Christian Victor, the eldest son of Helena, died of enteric fever while fighting in the war. He was thirty-three and had fought as an officer in several campaigns in Africa. Victoria, already bent with the grief of the defeats, was now shattered. Christian was buried in Pretoria, near his comrades, according to his wishes. Back in Scotland, his grandmother the queen lost interest in food, was unable to sleep, and grew listless. When Dr. Reid saw her on October 29, 1900, she cried almost constantly and was “most depressed.” Her journal was littered with the deaths of relatives and friends and the tragedy of this terrible war; it had all become unbearable.
She was slowly growing feebler. For years Victoria had been told to eat less, and her girth had attested to her robust appetites and inability, at times, even to walk for exercise. But by November 10, 1900, she had grown “emaciated” and had lost interest in food. Dr. Reid, on whom Victoria was now dependent, tried to get her to sleep with the opium-based Dover’s Powder. Dr. Reid wrote to Bertie to tell him his mother was deteriorating, and he advised against the queen’s traveling. Most of those close to Victoria were unaware of the seriousness of her condition, though, and Bertie was no exception. The man who stood to inherit the throne reminded the doctor: “The Queen has much extraordinary vitality and pluck.” But by December, in Osborne, the queen stayed in her room, only sipping broth and milk.
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As Victoria lay ill and wretched in her bed, the reformer Emily Hobhouse was carefully packing trunks with food and medicine for the women and children locked up in British concentration camps in South Africa. In 1900, in an attempt to combat the Boers’ guerrilla warfare tactics, the British had begun systematically burning the homes of Boers in the Orange Free State and the Transvaal, in what was known as “scorched earth policy.” The numbers in these camps, where whites were kept separate from blacks, began to swell. Hobhouse—whom Kitchener would call “that bloody woman”—had worked as a welfare campaigner and was determined to bring medical supplies to the encamped. A striking forty-year-old woman with intense brown eyes, Hobhouse sailed for South Africa in January 1901. She was horrified by the death and squalor in tent camps she described as “a living grave.” There was little food, medicine, or hygiene, and the camps were teeming with typhoid and blackwater fever. By 1902, twenty-eight thousand whites and fourteen thousand black Africans had died in these horrific grounds, almost double the number of British men who died fighting.
The queen had no idea of the atrocities occurring at British hands in these camps; the details only emerged, to great controversy, after her death. She would have been mortified. (Even her directive about horses had proven useless; hundreds of thousands were slaughtered.) She had disapproved of “hysterical” women sailing to South Africa, “often without imperative reasons,” and believed they were a nuisance to the soldiers a
nd officers there. (Lord Roberts prevented women from entering the Orange State unless they had a wounded son or husband, to please the queen.) The historian Jenny de Rueck says the barbaric South African concentration camps “arguably laid down a template for civilian suffering that subsequently the Herero of German South West Africa, the Jews of Europe, the Russians under Stalin, the Cambodians under Pol Pot and most recently the civilians in Rwanda and in all parts of the former Yugoslavia have endured.” Gladstone had died the year before the war began; it’s certain that he would have been incensed to discover this abuse too.
The likes of Conan Doyle trumpeted the glories of the war, of fighting alongside “ghillies from the Sutherland deer forests, bushmen from the back blocks of Australia, hard men from Ontario, dandy sportsmen from India and Ceylon, the horsemen of New Zealand.” He crowed that “on the plains of South Africa, the blood brotherhood of the Empire was sealed.” But the seamier side of the war was also being reported, with journalists’ dispatches daily slicing through government propaganda. The publisher W. T. Stead sensationally accused British troops of raping women. An illustrious group fought or reported from South Africa: Mahatma Gandhi—who sympathized with the Boers but supported the empire—organized the Indian Ambulance Corps. Lord Baden-Powell commanded a garrison during a 217-day siege on Mafeking. The British poet Rudyard Kipling, the future British prime minister Winston Churchill, and the Australian writer Banjo Paterson all worked as war correspondents. (Paterson described Churchill as “the most curious combination of ability and swagger,” adding sharply: “Persons burdened with inferiority complexes might sit up and take notice.”) This was the first war the British had fought against Europeans—or those descended from Europeans—since the Crimean War in 1853.
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It was also the last of the great imperialist, expansionist wars, when the empire stretched tight over land that rejected its rule. The brutal behavior of the soldiers left a scar on South Africans for generations. Crucially, the nexus between war and glory, between empire and military display, was severed. Perhaps more troublingly for the political class, the British argument that the empire represented the best of democracy was revealed as false—the Boer War had shown the rights of local people being trampled on for economic gain, and the lives of women and children in the camps lost through neglect and inhumanity.
By the end of 1900, the morality of the war was sharply in question. As Stanton Coit, the editor of Ethical World, wrote: “Never in this generation has there been among Englishmen of all classes so much self-searching, such self-doubt, as now.” Before the war had ended, Victoria’s world began to shrink and tremble, and the stout talisman grew thin and frail. As the nineteenth century turned to the twentieth, the empire was dimming, and so was its great queen.
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Victoria had been ailing for some time. She grew distracted and melancholy. Cataracts blurred her vision. She struggled to sleep, yet she became unusually placid and was unruffled by the things that once irritated her. In early December 1900, she was “full of morbid ideas of imaginary pains.” Dr. Reid settled her with opiates. On December 7, he described her as “nervous, complaining and childish.” She traveled to Osborne for Christmas and drank milk and egg flips, but she skipped most meals and went to bed early. On Christmas Day, Lady Churchill, who had been in Victoria’s court for half a century, died in her bed at Osborne. The news was broken gently to an ailing Victoria. “The loss to me,” read her diary entry, “is not to be told.”
On New Year’s Day 1901, as Australia was officially declared a federation, Victoria wrote in her journal: “Another year begins & I am feeling so weak & unwell that I enter upon it badly.” Dr. Reid sought a second opinion, which confirmed there had been many weeks of “cerebral degeneration.” On January 16, after two decades of service, Reid saw Victoria in bed for the first time. She was drowsy and thin, lying curled up on her right side. He “was struck by how small she appeared.” Uncharacteristically, nothing annoyed her. The next day, she was moved to her smaller bed, and a screen was placed around her so the men could not see her. When the princesses came to visit her, filing solemnly past her bed, she did not recognize them. The next night, Alix and Bertie sat up all night at her side, talking gently to her. While planning her death, Victoria had been afraid that Bertie might try to override her instructions, and so on January 18 she had told Reid she did not wish to see him. But in her final moments, she was tender, asking her eldest son to “kiss her face.” Her doctor watched her become more childlike, and he worried.
The last two decades had been physically torturous for Victoria. When she was properly examined for the first time, on her deathbed, her doctor found that Victoria had a prolapsed uterus and a ventral hernia—sources of significant pain and discomfort—both of which were most likely to have been caused by difficult labors and exacerbated by her subsequent weight gain. Perhaps it is unseemly, too personal to some, to reveal the ailments of a queen. But these conditions also explain some of Victoria’s chronic pain and difficulty of movement. She struggled to walk unsupported from 1883, after her fall and the death of John Brown. Other pains she concealed and bore privately. This vulnerability made Victoria especially grateful to those who physically bore her up—John Brown and later her Indian servants. She was extremely sensitive about who might touch her body after she died—she stipulated that it must only be Dr. Reid and female attendants.
Her doctor quietly took charge. Knowing “the princesses would disapprove,” Reid secretly sent a telegram to Kaiser Wilhelm, who had asked him to keep him informed about the queen’s health. The telegram read: “Disquieting symptoms have developed which cause considerable anxiety. This is private. Reid.” The princesses—especially Helena—had not wanted Bertie to come, either, and they made sure he was sent falsely optimistic notes. At Dr. Reid’s insistence, Helena relented and Bertie was sent for on January 19. That afternoon, the first official and public bulletin was issued: “The Queen is suffering from great physical prostration accompanied by symptoms that cause anxiety.” Arthur began the journey to England from Berlin, accompanied by Kaiser Wilhelm. Beatrice and Helena panicked and vowed to do whatever it took to stop their controversial nephew from stepping on English soil, firing off a telegram to Arthur. Dr. Reid’s curious softness toward Wilhelm is best explained by his instinctive recognition of the tenderness that an otherwise cruel, hubristic man was capable of. Pugnacious and belligerent, Wilhelm not only mistreated his own mother but freely crossed his formidable grandmother, too, even, most recently, infuriating her by expressing his support for the Boers. But he also had a deep respect and affection for Victoria, loving her more than he did his own mother.
At 6 P.M. on January 21, Victoria revived and asked Reid if she was better. She then focused on him, worrying that he might be tired and need help. She then remarked there had been “much better news from South Africa today.” Lying in her bed, ailing and frail, she asked Reid to stand next to her, and stared directly into his eyes. She was not, she told him firmly, ready to die. “I should like to live a little longer, as I have still a few things to settle. I have arranged most things, but there are still some left, and I want to live a little longer.” Her hunger to live was strong, and starkly different from her husband’s passivity four decades earlier. Reid reported: “She appealed to me in this pathetic way with great trust as if she thought I could make her live.”
Downstairs at Osborne, Bertie, Helena, and Beatrice were still hoping to stave off Wilhelm’s visit. Bertie decided to go to London and tell Wilhelm he could not see the queen at the moment, and that not even he had seen her, which was true. Upstairs, Reid and the maids lifted Victoria onto a smaller bed. Instructions she had created in 1875 had stipulated that “no one but John Brown” should watch over her when she died, with her female attendants. With Brown gone, that task fell to Reid.
Victoria was too blind to see who was standing around her in the small green room she had shared with Albert. Poor Vicky, then sixt
y, was holed up in her apartment in Prussia as cancer crawled across her organs. Sometimes, she wrote to her mother wretchedly, they could hear her cries of pain on the streets below. She could not eat or sleep; the pain was like “ever so many razors driven into my back.” But three of Victoria’s daughters stood there through the night—Helena, Louise, and Beatrice—as well as Bertie, Alix, Wilhelm, and Dr. Reid and the nurses and maids. Dr. Reid took pity on Wilhelm and allowed him to see Victoria for five minutes on his own. A bishop and the local vicar stood at the foot of her bed reciting Bible verses and praying. Victoria clung to life, grimly. Reid wrote to his wife: “I can’t help admiring her determination not to give up the struggle while she can.” The prayers went on for hours, until the men grew hoarse. They were asked to stop until it was clear Victoria was close to death. She lay impassive, stubborn, breathing.
At four o’clock on the afternoon of January 22, 1901, a blunt bulletin was issued from Osborne House: “The Queen is slowly sinking.” Dr. Reid stationed himself beside her, and Wilhelm stood opposite, like two sentinels of grief, as the others drifted in and out of the room. At five o’clock, the two men dropped to their knees on either side of the bed, and each placed an arm behind her back, propping her up in a semi-upright position. Bertie sat silently at the end of the bed. Louise kneeled next to Dr. Reid. With a final, quiet breath, Victoria died in the arms of her doctor and her grandson. Wilhelm, who would be at war with England in just fourteen years, silently squeezed Reid’s hand with gratitude and emotion. But it was Bertie who closed his mother’s eyes, sealing the light out.