Victoria

by Julia Baird

  “kiss the feet of the great barbarians”: Chapter 8 of Strachey, Queen Victoria.

  “I would gladly throw all up and retire into quiet”: February 15, 1878, Fulford, Darling Child, 282.

  “the Faery writes every day and telegraphs every hour.”: Disraeli appears to have started using the term “Faery” after he became prime minister for the first time. Monypenny and Buckle, Life of Benjamin Disraeli, 6:150.

  “Der alte Jude, das ist der Mann”: Ibid., 6:311.

  “I can never forget it”: Longford, Victoria R.I., 415.

  She opened Parliament three times while Disraeli was PM: St. Aubyn, Queen Victoria, 430. The years were 1876, 1877, and 1880.

  shaped Tory rhetoric for a century to come: See Matthew, Gladstone: 1809–1898, 267.

  “so much quicker than that of Mr. Gladstone”: November 26, 1875, Buckle, The Letters of Queen Victoria Between 1862 and 1878, 2:428.

  “the angels in the marble”: Leonard, The Great Rivalry, 151.

  protected from newly enfranchised working-class voters: Ibid.

  labor rights, arguing they were as important as property rights: Hibbert, Disraeli, 296.

  new laws…for the creation of working-class housing: Much of this progressive legislation was promoted and inspired by Richard Cross, who was the reforming home secretary in the government from 1874 to 1880. Disraeli was perfectly happy to take credit for these reforms.

  “an absolute falsehood”: QVJ, April 2, 1876.

  “almost incredible, & most mysterious!”: QVJ, December 14, 1878.

  “The good are always taken, the bad remain”: QVJ, December 14, 1878.

  “if going through life as smoothly as possible really constitutes happiness”: January 3, 1877, Fulford, Darling Child, 236.

  whose wasted arm had troubled her so much: Ibid., 26.

  “shaken the elasticity out” of her: QVJ, May 24, 1879.

  she seemed to have shrunk in height: Gladstone told his wife Victoria weighed eleven stone eight ounces, “which was rather much for her height.” St. Aubyn, Queen Victoria, 335. See also Bassett, Gladstone to His Wife.

  the queen at a wedding: Arthur, whom Vicky described as “universally respected and liked” and a “model Prince” like his father, got engaged in 1878 to a Prussian princess, Louise, the youngest daughter of Fritz Carl. Victoria was grumpy when she heard of the engagement—it had happened more quickly than she had wanted, she did not like the Prussian royal family, and she wished Louise were prettier: her nose and mouth were reportedly ugly and her teeth were bad. March 12, 1878, Fulford, Darling Child, 284. (It is striking, looking back at the discussion of potential candidates for matrimony between Victoria and Vicky, how the women were discussed in blunt, almost commercial terms—as though their gums were being inspected like Thoroughbreds’; their physical characteristics were dissected in great detail.) But for the wedding, Victoria wore a long white veil and the Koh-i-Noor diamond, as well as a court train for the first time since Albert died.

  privately dismissing her “ugly old face”: August 4, 1875, Fulford, Darling Child, 187.

  “My dear Grandmama is very tiny”: Ibid., 144.

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Enough to Kill Any Man

  “The Queen alone is enough to kill any man”: Hardie, Political Influence, 73.

  Ponsonby…was shocked by the language she used: Aronson, Victoria and Disraeli, 183.

  “I cd not trust him or give him my confidence”: Memorandum by Queen Victoria, April 18, 1880, RA, VIC/MAIN/C/34/65.

  “may submit to his democratic rule but not the Queen”: Arthur Ponsonby, Henry Ponsonby, 184.

  a man who had been the enemy of her government: Aldous, The Lion and the Unicorn, 307.

  Victoria grumpily summoned Gladstone to Windsor: Once the Queen commissioned Gladstone and he kissed her hand, he was formally acknowledged as parliamentary leader of the Liberal Party as well as prime minister.

  “perfect courtesy from which she never deviates”: Jenkins, Gladstone, 438.

  “very strong language”: QVJ, April 23, 1880.

  consent to their being made ministers: QVJ, April 27, 1880.

  bring in “democratic leaning”: Letter to Henry Ponsonby, April 8, 1880, quoted in St. Aubyn, Queen Victoria, 445.

  “All things considered, I was much pleased”: Aldous, The Lion and the Unicorn, 310.

  he would not be in office long: Monypenny and Buckle, Life of Benjamin Disraeli, 539.

  risen to 11.4 percent: These are trade union statistics, cited in Blake, Disraeli, 697.

  “the fall of the government over wh. I presided”: Quoted in ibid., 721.

  “their wives and families”: Aldous, The Lion and the Unicorn, 296.

  the mood of fatigue among the electorate: See Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery, 268.

  which had been annexed by Britain in 1877: This was particularly difficult for Victoria to stomach, as in 1881 Transvaal Boers had wiped out a British force at the battle of Majuba Hill. (Longford, Victoria R.I., 440.) She had not wanted to see African natives under the control of Boers—“a most merciless and cruel neighbour, and in fact oppressor, just like the southern slave-owners in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” (QVJ, July 30, 1881.)

  necessary means of protecting her empire: She wrote to Disraeli in 1879: “If we are to maintain our position as a first-rate Power, we must, with our Indian Empire and large Colonies, be Prepared for attacks and wars, somewhere or other, CONTINUALLY.” July 28, 1879, Queen Victoria to Lord Beaconsfield, Buckle, The Letters of Queen Victoria Between 1879 and 1885, 3:37–38.

  “an American stumping orator”: QVJ, December 2, 1879.

  “a little personally elated”: Aldous, The Lion and the Unicorn, 299.

  “some magnificent castle in an Italian romance”: Aronson, Victoria and Disraeli, 184.

  “She would only ask me to take a message to Albert”: Blake, Disraeli, 474.

  “truest kindest friend’s” final moments: Disraeli had refused Victoria’s offer of a baronetcy a year earlier, but had managed to procure one for Corry, who had become like a son to him, instead. Gladstone compared it to Caligula making his horse a consul. Some have since suggested Corry was Disraeli’s lover, and like a wife to him. Kuhn, “Sexual Ambiguity,” 16.

  the most “extraordinary man”…had passed: Aldous, The Lion and the Unicorn, 319.

  “All display without reality or genuineness”: Shannon, Gladstone: Heroic Minister, 275.

  “his favorite flowers from Osborne”: Blake, Disraeli, 752.

  “such want of respect”…they “nearly tumbled over one another”: QVJ, January 5, 1881.

  “only a piece of Parliamentary gossip”: Hardie writes that this was “an extraordinary lapse” on Disraeli’s part: “As early as the reign of Queen Anne, Swift had observed that it was well known ‘that Speeches on these occasions are ever digested by the advice of those who are in the chief confidence, and, consequently, that they are the sentiments of Her Majesty’s Ministers, as well as his own.’ ” Hardie, Political Influence, 76–77.

  it was obviously the sovereign’s speech: Ibid., 76, 192–93.

  “things are allowed to go on as they have done of late years”: Queen Victoria to Lord Granville, June 5, 1880, Buckle, The Letters of Queen Victoria Between 1879 and 1885, 3:108.

  Her own private struggles: In 1879, Vicky’s son Waldemar died of diphtheria. He was only eleven. Vicky was further wounded when Bismarck thoughtlessly gave a soiree on the night of the funeral. Victoria wrote sadly to her daughter: “My heart bleeds and aches for you.” “My wonder is,” she wrote, “how one lives at all through such terrible trials and shocks as that one and that life is not stopped at once.”

  “with totally different duties and vocations”: Rappaport, Queen Victoria, 428.

  not their entering the serious professions or voting: Queen Victoria to Vicky, June 26, 1872, Fulford, Dearest Child, 51. She told Vicky women should be “sensibly educated”—and “employed whenever they can be usefully”
but not “unsexed and made doctors (except in one branch), lawyers, voters etc. Do that, and you take at once away all their claim to protection on the part of the male sex.”

  Victoria described herself, conveniently, as “anomalous”: Ibid., 67.

  “men were seldom fit for the work”: Longford, Victoria R.I., 395.

  the idea of training women as doctors was “repulsive”: When she found out that her daughter Louise had arranged a secret meeting with the doctor Elizabeth Garrett—the first woman to qualify as a doctor in Britain—just to discuss her studies, Victoria was enraged. Louise, however, said, “It was a great pleasure to find her so enthusiastic in her work….She is one of those who can prove how much women can learn, if they put their whole heart, and soul in what they are about.” Hawksley, The Mystery of Princess Louise, 114.

  “while her husband was walking about in London”: Queen Victoria to Vicky, February 24, 1872, Fulford, Dearest Child, 30.

  crippled the British defense forces in the Crimea, in India, and in England: Levine, “Venereal Disease.” After witnessing its ravages in the Crimea, in 1862 Florence Nightingale organized a sanitary commission on venereal disease.

  admitted to the hospital for syphilis or gonorrhea: Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, 49.

  blasted from pulpits and Parliament alike: Pearsall, The Worm in the Bud, 278.

  escaped scrutiny and condemnation: The double standard was glaringly obvious to women like Josephine Butler, one of the greatest social reformers of the Victorian age, who realized, “A moral sin in a woman was spoken of as immensely worse than in a man.” (As J. Miller argued in 1859, “A woman falls but once, and society turns upon her as soon as the offence is known. A man falls many times, habitually, confessed by; yet society changes her countenance on him but little, if at all.” Prostitution Considered, 26.) Butler trekked across England and Europe inspecting brothels, advocating change, and befriending sex workers, often taking them into her home and nursing them.

  “under the present complex forms of life”: Wilson, Eminent Victorians, 108.

  total population of 2.3 million men and women: Pearsall, The Worm in the Bud, 250. “Dr. Acton, one of the less unreliable of the early Victoria specialists, stated that one in thirteen or fourteen of unmarried women of full age was immoral, but this statement contradicts other data.” Ibid., 276. Police reports were much lower.

  most commonly syphilis: According to Judith Walkowitz, syphilis was “endemic” during the Victorian era, as well as the Edwardian, and was “most prevalent among men of the upper and middle ranks and among the casual laboring poor.” Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society, 50. Mary Carpenter provides an estimate of circa 10 percent of the population. Health, Medicine, and Society, 72.

  ravaged children born to them: In the first half of 1846, there were fifty-six deaths due to syphilis in London. Thirty were babies under one. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society, 49.

  kidney failure, poisoning, and mouth sores: Frith, “Syphilis—Its Early History.”

  “irregular indulgence of a natural impulse”: Davidson and Hall, Sex, Sin and Suffering, 121.

  “paid me several shillings…to go with him”: Wilson, Eminent Victorians, 188.

  “poisoning the blood of the nation”: Though many of them ended up leading respectable lives, a woman who made a living from selling her body, he said, was “nothing better than a paid murderess, committing crime with impunity.” Hemyng wrote that sex workers were “poisoning the blood of the nation.” “The woman was nothing better than a paid murderess, committing crime with impunity.” Bracebridge Hemyng, “Prostitution in London,” in Mayhew, London Labour, 4:235.

  he was convinced that this was why the queen hated him: Magnus, in Gladstone: A Biography, 425–26, writes that Gladstone told his sons in 1897 that if the queen really thought the stories about his relationships with sex workers were true, then she had been remarkably kind, but continued: “I do not speak lightly, when I state my conviction that the circumstances of my farewell, which I think were altogether without parallel, had serious causes, beyond the operation of mere political disagreements, which no doubt went for something, but which were insufficient to explain them. Statements, whether true or false, must have been carried to her ears, which in her view required (and not merely allowed) the mode of proceeding which was actually adopted.” Magnus argues that while the queen would have heard some of the “foul stories,” “few responsible persons, even among Gladstone’s bitterest enemies, gave them credence.” When Lord Stanmore told Gladstone that the queen might have been suspicious of his intentions, he answered, “If the Queen thinks that of me, she is quite right to treat me as she does.” St. Aubyn, Queen Victoria, 446.

  Gladstone could listen to a sermon without “rising to reply”: April 19, 1875, Longford, Victoria R.I., 528.

  “half a most lovely statue, beautiful beyond measure”: Marlow, The Oak and the Ivy, 68.

  “a keen appreciation of a pretty face”: Isba, Gladstone and Women, 115.

  “There is but one of whom I know”: Ibid., 119.

  his “religio-sexual emotional crises”: Jenkins, Gladstone, 100.

  “strange, questionable, or more”: Ibid.

  “required to be limited and purged”: Ibid.

  made their way to Victoria, causing her coldness: Matthew, Gladstone: 1809–1898, 425–26.

  “to pursue and possess every sort of women”: Matthew, Gladstone: 1809–1898, 630.

  “underpaying, undervaluing and overworking” of women: Shaw, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 181.

  “to see how much one is loved”: Letter of March 6, 1882, Longford, Victoria R.I., 446.

  key role in establishing women’s soccer in Britain: One of her older brothers, the ninth Marquess of Queensberry, called Oscar Wilde a “somdomite” (famously, he couldn’t spell the word “sodomite”) when he had a relationship with his son Lord Alfred Douglas. Wilde sued for libel, and the resulting court case—where truth was a defense—led to his bankruptcy and ruination. He was convicted of “gross indecency” for relationships with men. After he left jail, Wilde went to France, where he died in Paris, at the Hotel d’Alsace.

  and that marriages should be equal: Dixie, Gloriana, 129–30.

  doubt was cast on the veracity of her claims: Pall Mall Gazette, March 19, 1883. See also Aberdeen Weekly Journal, March 19, 1883.

  “I know not how to bear it, or how to believe it possible”: Cullen, The Empress Brown, 201.

  “Fancy the Queen on a tricycle”: Ibid., 204.

  “depriving of all she so needs”: Queen Victoria to Viscount (later Earl of) Cranbrook, Windsor, March 30, 1883. Grosvenor, “Dear John.” Victoria wrote on this at length: “Perhaps never in history was there so strong and true an attachment, so warm and loving a friendship between the sovereign and servant [the phrase “between the sovereign and servant,” added above the text, is believed to have been included later] as existed between her and dear faithful Brown. Strength of character, as well as power of frame—the most fearless uprightness, kindness, sense of justice, honesty, independence and unselfishness, combined with a warm tender heart, retaining the homely simplicity of his early life, made him one of the most remarkable men who could be known—and the Queen feels that life for the second time is become most trying and sad to bear depriving of all she so needs.”

  with the little time he had left to live: QVJ, August 7, 1883.

  “so womanly, and so lonely”: Lord Hallam Tennyson to Victoria, Isle of Wight, October 22, 1892, RA, VIC/MAIN/R/44/ 14. Lord Tennyson’s son wrote to Victoria in response to a letter the queen had sent him about his father’s death. He told Victoria, “May I venture to add that at the end of the interview he said to me ‘I had tears in my eyes when I parted with the Queen, for she is so womanly, and so lonely.’ ” (This could also be “lovely”; the word is hard to read, but the “n” is very close to the other “n”s in Lord Tennyson’s writing.)

  it had only fiv
e for Disraeli: Cullen, The Empress Brown, 204.

  “painful for the Queen”: Henry Ponsonby to Queen Victoria, February 28, 1884, RA, VIC/ADDA12/902.

  That is what she wanted the world to understand: Queen Victoria to Henry Ponsonby, February 23, 1884, RA, Add. A/12/899. See also Kuhn, Henry and Mary Ponsonby, 220–21.

  a tame life in the wild Highlands: These books also had a political purpose too, effectively silencing those who accused her of being too interfering and biased politically: why, she was just a royal dame wandering through the hills of Scotland.

  “It was very exhilarating”: “Kenward Philip,” John Brown’s Legs or Leaves from a Journal in the Lowlands, dedicated to “the Memory of those extraordinary Legs, poor bruised and scratched darlings.” From Longford, Victoria R.I., 460.

  not be “worthy of such confidences”: Bell, Randall Davidson, 94.

  “ ‘No one loves you more’ ”: Cullen, The Empress Brown, 216.

  “does become sadder and sadder and harder”: Queen Victoria to Vicky, January 2, 1884, Fulford, Beloved Mama, 155.

  “succession of trials and sufferings”: Queen Victoria to Vicky, March 26, 1884, ibid., 162.

  Childhood games could be fatal: Kerr, “The Fortunes of Haemophiliacs,” 359–60.

  who ensured she was always near her son: Bennett, Queen Victoria’s Children, 124.

  Leopold should not engage in strenuous exertion: Footnote 66 in Kerr, “The Fortunes of Haemophiliacs,” cites “Editorial: Prince Leopold,” British Medical Journal 1 (1868): 148.

  the blood of hemophiliacs took longer to clot: Potts and Potts, Queen Victoria’s Gene, 51.

  avoidance of violent boyhood games, and rest: Walker, “On Haemophilia,” 605–7.

  he wanted to either “live or die hard”: Rushton, “Leopold: The ‘Bleeder Prince,’ ” 487.

  longevity and the ability to earn an income: Kerr, “The Fortunes of Haemophiliacs,” 367.