Victoria

by Julia Baird

  * * *

  * Leopold II’s habits never changed. At age sixty-seven, he impregnated a teenage prostitute, whom he installed in a villa and gave a title. He married her just days before he died in 1909. Belgians booed his funeral procession.

  CHAPTER 30

  The End of the Victorian Age: “The Streets Were Indeed a Strange Sight”

  England’s Queen is dead! The words sound as heavily as though one should say, “The sun is no longer in the sky!”

  —MARIE CORELLI

  It is like a roof being off a house to think of an England Queenless.

  —ARTHUR BENSON

  A profound, eerie silence hung over London on February 1, 1901. A great crowd stood crammed on streets and corners, standing at windows, and sitting on roofs, craning to catch a glimpse of the polished oak box. The sad silence was broken only by the rattling gun carriage bearing Queen Victoria’s coffin. The novelist Maurice Baring said, “London was like a dead city….One went about feeling as if one had cheated at cards.” As the steam train carrying Victoria’s coffin had rumbled along the track north from Portsmouth to London, thousands had knelt quietly in damp fields and bowed their heads. A crowd lining the rail lines at Battersea Park had silently raised their hats and sighed. Most of them had known no monarch other than the tiny eighty-one-year-old who ruled Britannia for sixty-three years, seven months, and two days.

  The white-draped coffin had been placed on a gun carriage and was making its journey from Victoria Station to Paddington before going to Windsor. The pavements were thick with crowds of people dressed in black standing red-eyed in the cold February air. Flower girls in rags of crêpe pressed past people’s elbows. The women’s rights campaigner Josephine Butler felt as though she had lost a “dear friend”: “Everybody is crying, & people’s blinds are drawn down. It is a real, personal grief.” Henry James stared out of a window at Buckingham Gate and marveled at the “incredibly and immeasurably vast” crowd: “We all felt, publicly, at first, quite motherless.” Diarist Lady Monkswell, watching from a shop nearby, cried and trembled when she saw the coffin. “The streets were indeed a strange sight,” she said, “thronged with chiefly decent, respectable & middle-aged people, every one in mourning….I silently bid her farewell. The people stood uncovered & silent.”

  Britons found Victoria’s death oddly unnerving—as though the cornerstone of a building had slipped and they were all walking, tilted, on a new earth. Grief was mingled with alarm. Some, who stood mute and cold, craning for a glimpse of the passing coffin, were heard muttering, “God help us.” Arthur Benson puzzled at the peculiarly personal grief: people wept openly in public, and even republicans who wanted an end to the monarchy found they were affected. Florence Nightingale ensured her entire house was in full mourning, wanting to do something “to show that one cares.” One woman, who went to Hyde Park to watch the procession pass by, wrote: “Intense crowd, never saw anything like it, all silent.” The passing of the previous monarch, William IV, by contrast, had barely been noted; no one cried at his funeral.

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  After an initial ruckus outside Osborne, where press reporters ran along the road screaming, “The Queen is dead!” a hush had quickly fallen over England. Henry James described the ensuing mood as “strange and indescribable”: people spoke in whispers, as though scared of something. He was surprised at the reaction, because her death was not sudden or unusual: it was “a simple running down of the old used up watch,” the death of an old widow who had thrown “her good fat weight into the scales of general decency.” Yet in the following days, the American-born writer felt unexpectedly distressed. He, like so many, mourned the “safe and motherly old middle-class Queen, who held the nation warm under the fold of her big, hideous Scotch-plaid shawl.” Victoria had become a kind of talisman of decorum and stability, a shield against upsetting turmoil. And now, her apotheosis was complete. The Times wrote that they had lost not just a mother but also a “personal benefactress” they had come almost to worship. The New York Post described her power as “mythic glory.”

  Victoria had wanted a funeral done “with respect—but simply.” Having observed the military funerals held for Prince Leopold and then Beatrice’s husband, Liko, she had decided she would also like one. No pomp, just officers in uniform and Highland pipers in kilts, and Beethoven. She insisted her coffin should be “always carried by soldiers or my servants & not by undertakers.” She also asked that the gun carriage be muffled so it would not make as much noise as usual. At the center of the booming of guns, waving of plumes, and a fleet of escorting ships lay the still body of the queen. She had her deepest secret packed carefully beside her, concealed by layers of gauze and flowers, then charcoal lining, and a polished wood coffin. Only four people knew what was there: her doctor and three of her ladies. This secret would stay buried with her for a century.

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  On December 9, 1897, three years before she died, Victoria dictated the confidential, private instructions for her burial, which she said should always be carried by the most senior person traveling with her, and opened only upon her death. These instructions are contained in Dr. Reid’s archives, held by his family at Trenton. In them she included a long list of objects she wanted placed in her coffin. On her hands she wanted five rings from Albert as well as rings from Feodora; her mother, Victoire; Louise; and Beatrice. She also wanted “a plain golden wedding ring” that had belonged to the mother of John Brown, whom she described in effusive terms. Brown had worn the ring for a short time, she said, but Victoria had worn it “constantly” since his death and wished to be buried with it on her hand. Which finger was not specified.

  The queen also requested that framed photographs of Albert and all her children and grandchildren be put in her coffin. She also wanted, as she explained in detail, a colored photograph of John Brown in profile, to be placed in a leather case with some locks of his hair, along with other photographs of him (which she had often carefully carried in her pocket), and placed in her hand. She also asked for the cast of Albert’s hand, which she had always kept near her, to be put in her coffin. As well, she wanted one of Albert’s handkerchiefs and cloaks, a shawl made by Alice, and, she wrote, a pocket handkerchief of “my faithful Brown, that friend who was more devoted to me than anyone, to be laid on me.”

  The royal family, who would soon set about destroying all record of the broad-shouldered Scot, was shielded from this sight. Dr. Reid was instructed to wrap her hand in gauze after placing Brown’s hair in it, then flowers were discreetly arranged over the gauze. Even in death, Brown was with his queen, as well as Albert and her children: his mother’s wedding ring on her finger, his portrait and hair in her hand, his handkerchief covering her body.

  The gentle, meticulous Dr. Reid carefully arranged the contents of the queen’s coffin with her ladies. Her body was measured, prepared, and slid into a silk dressing gown with the Order of the Garter draped across her chest. Her hair was cut off, and white flowers were strewn along the base of the veil that framed her face. Dr. Reid’s wife, Susan, said she looked beautiful, “like a marble statue.” On January 22, Bertie, the kaiser, Dr. Reid, and some others lifted her body into the coffin before the charcoal was packed in and the lid screwed down. Then the long trip to Windsor began.

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  The world shuddered at the news of the queen’s death. Thousands of telegrams flew to Osborne. In London, actors walked off stages halfway through plays. Traffic stopped. In New York, the stock market closed for a day. In New Guinea, tribes remembered the divine, holy Mother who had loomed over them. In South Africa, Australia, Canada, and India and the farthest reaches of the vast English Empire, people stopped and prayed. Victoria had become an archetypal, maternal deity, cutting across boundaries of culture and religion. Muslims in London prayed for “the Sovereign of the greatest number of The True Believers in the world.” The Indian viceroy, Lord Curzon, said the Indians thought of her almost as a saint. A Bengali aristocrat, Maharaja B
ahadur Sir Jotindra Mohun Tagore, said she was like “the Great Universal Mother, who is worshipped as the Adya-Sakti of our [Hindu] mythology.” In Persia, she was “the good angel who saved us from destruction.”

  —

  Victoria had, in a way she did not anticipate, changed everything for women. She stirred something that was difficult to name, a longing, or a stiffening of the spine; she was a visible sign of a woman who adored her family, and yet had full rights and an independent income. H. G. Wells believed that at the moment the crown was placed on her head, there was a “stir of emancipation.” His mother had followed Victoria’s life—every word, joy, or hurt—with a “passionate loyalty”:

  The Queen, also a small woman, was in fact my mother’s compensatory personality, her imaginative consolation for all the restrictions and hardships that her sex, her diminutive size, her motherhood and all the endless difficulties of life, imposed upon her. The dear Queen could command her husband as a subject and wilt the tremendous Mr. Gladstone with awe. How would it feel to be in that position? One would say this. One would do that. I have no doubt about my mother’s reveries. In her latter years in a black bonnet and a black silk dress she became curiously suggestive of the supreme widow.

  A good queen softened men, said the brilliant campaigner Josephine Butler: “It melts away some of their roughness & contempt of women.” Even the suffragettes, whose cause the queen had dismissed, cited her example and influence. Emily Davison, who became the first martyr of the suffragette movement in 1913 when she was fatally injured under the hooves of the king’s horse at the Derby, wrote a letter to The Times arguing that Victoria demonstrated there should be no such thing as “women’s work”: Victoria had read every document, made her own decisions, and was in no way a “mere figure-head.” Without having ever read the queen’s diary or studied her correspondence, Davison was right.

  And her effect on women spanned the globe. A female Japanese magazine editor congratulated her on “awakening even in these distant parts the ambition to become empress over self.” When the American civil rights leader Susan B. Anthony met Queen Victoria in 1899 at a reception in Windsor, she said she felt a “thrill…when looking in her wonderful face.” Amelia Bloomer claimed, “If it is right for Victoria to sit on the throne in England it is right for any American Woman to occupy the Presidential Chair at Washington.” Victoria’s vantage point made clever women jealous. “I wonder,” wrote the American author Sara Jane Lippincott—known as Grace Greenwood—in 1883, “if her Majesty has ever realized her blessed privilege in being able to converse freely with ‘the first men of the age’; to avow her interest in politics…without fearing to be set down as a ‘strong-minded female out of her sphere.’ ” But Victoria was so busy making herself small so Albert would feel big, she did not realize how little she had to fight for.

  Because of all this, Victoria’s work gave a steady, rarely articulated impetus to the suffragette campaign. At the time of her death, Reynold’s News wrote that her life had “taught us the power we are willfully allowing to go to waste in the womanhood of the nation…there are many thousands of possible Victorias in the kingdom. No longer can it be argued…women are unfitted for public duties.” She was a symbol of female strength and intelligence. But perhaps her singularity was what made her more palatable during an era of persistent inequality. She was one woman ruling; she was not, to most, a sign that more would follow. She inherited power; she did not have to fight for it or claw it away from men. It was placed gently upon her head, like a divine burden.

  There can be no doubt, though, that the women Victoria championed were mostly white and Western. She was furious if she heard tales of a woman being groped on a train in England, or of someone like Lady Florence Dixie being attacked near Windsor. But during her reign, countless women in India, Afghanistan, and Africa were raped, killed, and widowed in the series of “little wars” that expanded the boundaries of the British Empire. Millions starved.* The incongruity of empire weighed on her—her strongest impulse was the greatness of Britain, but she was distressed to hear of the cost at which that greatness was achieved. The worst atrocities of the century were occurring in British concentration camps in South Africa as Victoria lay dying.

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  On February 4, 1901, the body of Queen Victoria was lowered into the mausoleum at Frogmore next to Albert. As her family closed the doors to the marbled grave, the sleet falling outside turned to snow, which brought stillness, silence, and the white funeral Victoria had always dreamed of. Her coffin was draped with white, the horses drawing her coffin were white, and the marble of her grave was white. The drapes everywhere were to be white and gold, and she ordered that no black should be seen anywhere. Victoria was adamant that death should not be associated with darkness, but light. Tennyson had given her this idea, saying to her that death was already dreadful enough, so why should it be “clothed with everything to make it worse?”

  She was not to be a queen of scarlet, green, or rose: she had long abandoned plumage, and pretensions to her own beauty, and sought instead to surround herself with beautiful people. Her plain, undecorated demeanor prompted a shepherd boy to ask: “Why don’t she put on clothes so that folks might know her?” Victoria was a queen of black or white who ruled as emphatically as she loved. And in death, the widow became a bride again. She asked to be buried in white silk and cashmere, with a cape and veil over her face. Victoria had lived almost as twice as long as her husband, and had ruled on her own for twice as long as they spent ruling together.

  When speaking of her greatest desires, the word Victoria repeated throughout her life was “simple.” She wanted a simple life. She eschewed corsets, and was primarily concerned with comfort. (She had rolled her eyes at the “new fashion of very tight gowns” in 1867.) The queen was happiest at Glassalt Shiel, a tiny, isolated Scottish cottage in the “lovely wild & haunting country” of the Highlands, away from mansions and castles, manifold eyes and demands. As G. K. Chesterton wrote not long after her death, her “defiant humility” sat at the heart of the empire: “No one could deny that she stood, for the humblest, the shortest and the most indestructible of human gospels, that when all troubles and trouble mongers have had their say, our work can be done till sunset, our life can be lived till death.” That was true. But though her humility was defiant, her defiance was not humble.

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  Victoria did not want to die. Perhaps the greatest contradiction of her character was her belief that she yearned for death; in truth, she clung tenaciously to life. Whenever in danger, she instinctively reared back; when her carriage overturned in Scotland, or old age weighed heavily, she cried out for more time. Just three years before she died, she wrote in her journal: “My great lameness, etc., makes me feel how age is creeping on. Seventy-eight is a good age, but I pray yet to be spared a little longer for the sake of my country and dear ones.”

  She never stopped working. In the last few months of her life, Victoria complained that while she liked to take a nap after lunch to combat her nighttime insomnia, it “loses time.” Three days before she died, although fluid was filling her joints and she was struggling to talk, she spoke to Dr. Reid about South Africa and worried about the war. A woman who had spent most of her life praying to be with her Albert in heaven was still begging her doctor for more time on earth. There were more things to sort out, more disasters to prevent, more wars to fight, more soldiers to protect.

  There was always more. Victoria believed that her greatest work—to improve herself, as Albert had bidden her—was not yet complete. “I die,” she wrote in instructions to Bertie and Beatrice about her funeral, “in peace with all fully aware of my many faults.” Those encircling her bedside knew of her faults: her capriciousness, her temper, her domineering way with her children, her sharp eye, her tendency to self-pity, her unchecked selfishness, her conviction that she was always right. But they also knew of her kindness, her loyalty, her humor, her devotion to her work, her faith, her lac
k of pretension or prejudice, and her resilience. As Laurence Housman wrote, “The most dramatic thing about Queen Victoria was her duration: in the moving age, to which she gave her name, she remained static.” It was why, in her lifetime, she went from a teenager to a totem of empire.

  Victoria’s heart beat strongly to her last breath, something Dr. Reid made a particular point of noting. This is the greatest clue to understanding the woman who helped shape the modern world, and to dispelling myths about her supposed passivity, her reliance on men and distaste for power. She may have complained often, but she persisted. She grieved for decades, but as generations of statesmen witnessed, she also fought without flinching. Her unbending, steadfast presence shaped a century as she grasped the mantle of power when other women had none. To fly over London today and see her magisterial marble figure looming above the streets is to marvel at how a reclusive, widowed mother of nine achieved unparalleled greatness. The answer is simple: Victoria endured.

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  * A bedridden Florence Nightingale was working on India, where almost 29 million people died of starvation under British rule as the result of an interminable round of famine. Nightingale spent many years trying to force the British government to alleviate the poverty there, campaigning for improved irrigation and reform of land tenure. (Bostridge, Florence Nightingale, 473.) She was deeply disappointed when, even after the famine of 1877, in which 4 million died in Bombay and Madras alone, the schemes she supported were not adopted.