Victoria

by Julia Baird

  Edward, the Duke of Kent, was a proud, militaristic man. He doted on his baby daughter and boasted that, despite the odds, one day she would be queen.

  Victoire, Victoria’s German mother, would always remain an outsider in England, but she longed for greater power herself.

  The robust little Victoria was likened to a king in petticoats; the young princess had a fondness for dolls and a tendency to throw tantrums.

  When the eighteen-year-old Victoria was told the king had died, she was ready to become queen. But her governess hovered behind the door, holding smelling salts.

  By 1851, their wedding clothes had grown more snug—but Victoria liked to reenact the moment, even eleven years later, to remind her public she was still bride to her handsome groom.

  American painter Thomas Sully was eager to capture Victoria’s “sweet tone of voice” and “gentle manner” in her coronation year. She was praised for her poise, maintaining composure while the men around her fumbled lines and stumbled down stairs.

  Albert was “excessively handsome,” wrote a smitten Victoria in her journal. She was so taken by Albert’s “delicate mustachios” that she asked that all soldiers in the British army be ordered to grow them.

  Prince Albert, by Queen Victoria (1840)

  In 1859, as she turned forty, Victoria was a woman in her prime—with nine children, a country that had avoided revolution, and a husband she adored. She thought this portrait, by court favorite Franz Xaver Winterhalter, magnificent.

  Vicky, the eldest child of Victoria and Albert, was precociously clever. She married when she was a teenager and went to live in Prussia, where she struggled with a hostile public and a cruel son, the future Kaiser Wilhelm II.

  Victoria (here with Bertie, Vicky, Alice, and Alfred) was a strong disciplinarian who was deeply involved in the lives of her children.

  Osborne House, on the lush, tranquil Isle of Wight, was the first private home owned by the royal family. Victoria, who longed for quiet and pure air, was thrilled: “all our very own.”

  Bertie was a sociable boy whose charm outweighed his intellect; his parents had his skull inspected for faults. Keenly conscious of their disappointment, the future King Edward VII rebelled and flirted with debauchery.

  Victoria and Albert doted on Beatrice, their youngest child (sketched by Victoria here). Victoria fell asleep holding her on the night Albert died, and maintained a strong grip on her forever afterward.

  The Great Exhibition of 1851 was the most shining achievement of Victoria’s reign, its success largely due to Albert. “We are capable,” she wrote, “of doing almost anything.”

  Baroness Lehzen, Victoria’s governess, was intent on teaching her young charge to be a strong, stubborn queen. Albert would decide she had too much influence over his wife, and later forced her to leave.

  King Leopold I, Victoria’s uncle, provided steady advice and tender concern for the fatherless princess. He also encouraged her to marry her cousin Albert, thereby placing a fellow Coburg on the pinnacle of British power.

  Victoria became infatuated with her droll prime minister, Lord Melbourne, and he in turn adored her. Later, both Victoria and the editors of her letters would be embarrassed by her effusive affection for an older man.

  Former army officer John Conroy was desperate to control the throne and tried to bully the teenage Victoria into handing over power to him and her mother. Victoria despised him.

  Lord Tennyson’s poems provided solace for the grieving, widowed Victoria. He was one of the few to recognize how lonely she was on “that terrible height.”

  Victoria found Robert Peel stiff and reserved; not long after being made queen, she prevented him from becoming prime minister for a time so she could keep Lord Melbourne in power. But Albert admired him, and eventually she did too.

  Immediately upon becoming queen, Victoria wanted to live in the light, spacious Buckingham Palace. Eventually its poor sanitation and ventilation would make it oppressive.

  Victoria was never entirely at home in the large spaces of Windsor Castle, but after Albert died there in 1861, she took great care to preserve his rooms exactly as they had been when he was alive.

  Albert worked closely with renowned architect Thomas Cubitt to build Osborne House in Italianate style, a perfect summer retreat for his family.

  The royal couple were instantly enchanted by Balmoral Castle when they first saw it in 1848. Victoria wrote that it “seemed to breathe freedom & peace making one forget the world & its sad turmoil.”

  Albert thrilled to the solitude of the Highlands, telling his stepmother, “One rarely sees a human face; where the snow already covers the mountain tops, and the wild deer come creeping stealthily around the house. I, naughty man, have also been creeping stealthily after the harmless stags.” Victoria waited anxiously for the news of her husband’s haul.

  A Highland Landscape, by Queen Victoria (1859)

  A progressive thinker and polymath with a fierce work ethic, Albert played a crucial role in the creation of the modern monarchy: nonpartisan, constitutional, and respectable. Even though he was just out of his thirties, Albert’s punishing workload, melancholy, and poor health made him seem like a much older man.

  The memorial portrait of Albert captured him as a young man, dressed like a Christian knight, his life’s battle at an end. Victoria inscribed it: “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course.”

  In 1862, just a few weeks after the death of her father, Princess Louise, a gifted artist, drew this image of Victoria dreaming of being reunited with Albert. The date was February 10, their anniversary.

  In the period after Albert’s death, Queen Victoria recreated sober mourning scenes for photographs, gathering her black-clad daughters around his bust. “The whole house,” wrote one lady-in-waiting, “seems like Pompeii.”

  Victoria on horseback at Balmoral (1863), with John Brown

  Her children dubbed him “the Queen’s stallion,” but Victoria proudly called John Brown her best friend, telling him: “No one loves you more than I do.” Strong, strapping, and irreverent, Brown was the only man who could persuade Victoria to do something she did not want to do.

  Victoria’s flamboyant Tory prime minister Benjamin Disraeli made an art form of charm. He entertained and flattered Victoria, calling her his “Faery Queen.”

  The cerebral William Gladstone was made prime minister four times. He was adored by the British public but was utterly incapable of winning Victoria’s favor. He said that “the Queen alone is enough to kill any man.”

  Victoria died in the arms of her grandson Kaiser Wilhelm II. Just fourteen years later he would be at war with England.

  When Beatrice, Victoria’s youngest child, married Henry of Battenberg, her mother did not talk to her for seven months. When the dashing Henry died on a ship off the coast of Africa, the two women became companions again.

  Bertie, the future King Edward VII, was fond of gambling, horseracing, and brothels. Even as she grew old, Victoria was loath to hand over any official duties to her oldest son.

  Abdul Karim, known as “the Munshi,” inveigled his way into Victoria’s affections as her servant and then as a clerk. Her family disliked and distrusted him.

  Even at the age of eighty, Victoria demanded her full rights as monarch. She devoured reports of the Boer War, which broke out in 1899.

  There are very few photographs of Victoria smiling, although she had a keen sense of humor. This was taken at her Golden Jubilee in 1887; her daughters thought it an inappropriate image for a monarch.

  Scottish doctor James Reid attended Victoria conscientiously for the last decades of her life. She entrusted him with her instructions for burial, and with them the deepest secrets of her life. His immaculately preserved notebooks provide remarkable insights into the heart of a queen.

  When Queen Victoria died in 1901, the streets were packed with dense crowds, and were peculiarly silent. Author Henry James said, “We all felt quite motherless.”
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  For Poppy and Sam,

  my magical children

  Author’s Note

  I first began thinking about Queen Victoria in the aftermath of the 2008 presidential election campaign, when working for Newsweek in New York. Our editorial team had vigorously debated the way we talk about women in positions of power, and I had been writing about the unlikely appearance of Sarah Palin in the race as John McCain’s running mate, as well as about Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful bid for the presidency. One of the more robust arguments we had was about how we are still seemingly unable to reconcile women and power; too often it seems an awkward, surprising, unlikely, and troubling pairing. After one of these conversations, my editor, Jon Meacham, suggested that Queen Victoria had not been examined properly for some time, and the six months I spent reading in the New York Society Library confirmed this; the unvarying repetition of the same views about Victoria, with rare fresh interrogation of new material, piqued my interest.

  Since then, I have dug through material from archives in London, Oxford, Scotland, Sydney, Germany, and America in a bid to find out who Victoria was: poring over dusty documents, deciphering appalling handwriting, and decoding hieroglyphics in aging leather journals. I walked slowly and repeatedly through the rooms she lived in at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, Windsor Castle, Buckingham Palace, and Balmoral Castle in Scotland. Osborne House has been frozen in time and is still crammed with mementoes, virtually unchanged from the moment Victoria died: sculptures of baby’s limbs, snippets of children’s hair, paintings commissioned by a young, wealthy husband and wife for each other’s delight. Windsor, which Victoria hated, contains little remaining evidence of her. Balmoral was most revealing not for the tartan furnishings or the many portraits of her beloved dogs, but for its sense of soothing, wild remoteness, even in the twenty-first century.

  But there was one important obstacle that was proving impossible to hurdle: I could not get access to her correspondence and personal notebooks contained in the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle, the most important records of all. I sent three requests: one that was not answered and two that were denied on the grounds that this was my first biography and I had not previously published a book on the royal family. I had continued to press, pointing out that I had a Ph.D. in history as well as a book contract, and assuring that I would take a careful, scholarly approach to any material. But it was not until mid-2013, after the governor general of Australia, Quentin Bryce, and her secretary, Stephen Brady, lobbied the queen’s secretary on my behalf—vouching for my character—that I was allowed entry. I was thrilled, if discombobulated, by the fact that neither my project nor the nature of my qualifications had changed; it was only the status of my advocate that had pushed open the doors.

  Finally, in 2014, I walked up the hundred-odd steps up to the Round Tower of Windsor Castle. The materials there are rich, beautifully preserved, and carefully guarded: every time you go to the bathroom, an escort accompanies you so you don’t try to smuggle out precious documents. Glorious, hazy summer days passed in a blur as I sat reading in the cool stone tower. The staff members were polite and helpful, and their knowledge of the material was impeccable.

  Before starting work at the Royal Archives, which is run by the Royal Household, you must sign a contract that ensures you are aware they have absolute control of the material you are about to see. (These records, closed to the public, are not automatically released after thirty years like other British government records, and are exempt from Freedom of Information Laws.) The contract states that: “All intended quotations from records in the Royal Archives, and all intended passages based on information obtained from those records, must be submitted to the Assistant Keeper of the Royal Archives in English. Any publication or dissemination of any kind of any such material, in any media, is subject to the prior written permission of the Assistant Keeper. Quotations must be shown in context. The text should not be sent to the publisher until this permission has been granted.” I signed.

  Once I had finished my draft, the Senior Archivist, Miss Pamela Clark, reminded me in an email: “As stated in our rules, which you signed, you need to send me any sections of your text which are based on Royal Archives material, showing the relevant passages in the context of the surrounding paragraph or two of your commentary.” As I had used a great deal of archival material I sent my full manuscript.

  Several months later, I received a reply from Miss Clark that included some helpful comments and minor corrections. To my surprise, she also asked me to remove large sections of my book based on material I had found not inside but outside the archives. Her concerns focused on the papers of Victoria’s doctor, Sir James Reid, which are held by his family in Scotland, particularly “the documents in which the Queen issued instructions as to who should tend her in her final illness, arrangements for her funeral and what items she wanted placed in her coffin.” Miss Clark also pointed to Reid’s records of “details of the Queen’s medical condition”.

  This was a difficult decision to make, as I have great respect for the royal family and I was very grateful for the opportunity to study the material held at Windsor Castle. But after much thought, I decided to publish the sections of the book based on Dr. Reid’s observations, on the following grounds. First, the agreement I had signed was only to do with material from the Royal Archives, which were treated carefully and accurately. I have fully complied with that agreement. Second, most of this material had been published by Lady Michaela Reid before, in her book about Sir James and in a subsequent journal article, even though it has been ignored or omitted by most biographers since (the reason for which was now becoming clear). Lady Michaela has given me full permission to quote from these papers with impunity. Her grandfather-in-law’s documents remain in the possession of the Reid family. Third, as a historian it is difficult to concede to a request—and the removal of these passages was a “request”—which is about redacting important material, much of which is already in the public domain, about events that occurred more than a century ago. The request to remove all passages based on information from Reid was also further evidence of the Royal Household’s continuing desire to bury the truth about Victoria’s relationship with her Highland servant, John Brown.

  The keepers of the Royal Archives, which span more than two centuries, from George III to the present day, are authoritative, properly fastidious and concerned with accuracy. But the secrecy and lack of transparency regarding this crucial material is at odds with the pursuit of history: of a rigorous, exhausting analysis of primary evidence that will enable a better understanding of events as they unfolded and the people who drove, witnessed, or were swept away by them. Asking a historian to withdraw work based on documents held by the family of the author—which you have full permission to publish—can only amount to an attempt to censor or obscure a full account of history.

  It is my hope that those who read this book will understand how intently and thoroughly I have researched the life of Queen Victoria, and how inconsistent with that approach it would have been to delete large sections of the book for no clearly articulated reason. It was the object of this book to hack through myths, not hew to them.

  Julia Baird

  July 2016

  Acknowledgments

  The writing of this book has spanned continents and years, and the debts of gratitude rival the miles flown. First of all, I am very grateful to Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, for her gracious permission to study the Royal Archives of Britain without restriction and to quote material subject to copyright. The senior archivist, Miss Pamela Clark, was particularly helpful in sharing some of her vast knowledge of these archives. I should also note that on September 9, 2015, as I was doing the final edits on this book, Her Majesty finally surpassed her great-great-grandmother Victoria’s record to become Britain’s longest-serving monarch.

  I have worked in dozens of libraries—and nearby cafés—while working on the life of Victoria: the New York Public Library, t
he New York Society Library, Penn University Library, the State Library of New South Wales, the Mitchell Library, the National Library of Australia, the National Library of Scotland, the British Library, the London Library, and Manly Library. I must thank in particular Patrick Fletcher from the New York Society Library; Anna Sander, the Lonsdale Curator of Archives and Manuscripts from Balliol College, Oxford; Dr. Ben Arnold, the assistant admissions officer for the Bodleian Library, Oxford; and Michael Hunt, the curator at Osborne House.