Queen Victoria--Twenty-Four Days That Changed Her Life

by Lucy Worsley

  Queen Victoria

  Twenty-Four Days That Changed Her Life

  LUCY WORSLEY

  Begin Reading

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

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  To Ned and Mark

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Map

  Introduction

  PART ONE: A NAUGHTY DAUGHTER

  1. Double Wedding: Kew Palace, 11 July 1818

  2. Birth: Kensington Palace, 24 May 1819

  3. Wet Feet: Sidmouth, 23 January 1820

  4. ‘I will be good’: Kensington Palace, 11 March 1830

  5. The Three Missing Weeks: Ramsgate, October 1835

  6. Albert: Kensington Palace, 18 May 1836

  7. Accession: Kensington Palace, 20 June 1837

  8. Coronation: Buckingham Palace, 28 June 1838

  9. In Lady Flora’s Bedchamber: Buckingham Palace, 27 June 1839

  PART TWO: THE GOOD WIFE

  10. The Proposal: Windsor Castle, 10–15 October 1839

  11. Wedding Day: three palaces, 10 February 1840

  12. ‘Oh Madam it is a Princess’: Buckingham Palace, 21 November 1840

  13. Christmas at Windsor: 25 December 1850

  14. A Maharaja on the Isle of Wight: 21–24 August 1854

  15. Miss Nightingale at Balmoral: 21 September 1856

  16. A Night with Nellie: 6 September 1861

  17. The Blue Room: Windsor Castle, 14 December 1861

  PART THREE: THE WIDOW OF WINDSOR

  18. ‘Sewer-poison’: Sandringham, 13 December 1871

  19. Lunch with Disraeli: Hughenden Manor, 15 December 1877

  20. John Brown’s Legs: 6 March 1884

  21. Baby Gets Married: Osborne House, 23 July 1885

  22. Munshi-Mania: Excelsior Hotel Regina, French Riviera, 4 April 1897

  23. Apotheosis: London, 22 June 1897

  24. Deathbed: Osborne, 22 January 1901

  Photographs

  Acknowledgements

  Sources

  Notes

  Index

  Also by Lucy Worsley

  Picture Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Introduction

  An early piano composition of mine, entitled ‘Purple Velvet for Queen Victoria’, was a sombre and rather menacing funeral march. Like many kids, I grew up believing that the queen was, for some unknown reason, in mourning her whole life long. The most powerful, memorable images of Victoria show her as a little old lady, potato-like in appearance, dressed in everlasting black.

  In recent years, there have been many attempts in popular culture – for example, the cinema film Young Victoria, or the television series Victoria – to overturn this funereal image. The big and small screens have both shown us a less decorous, more passionate young princess who loved dancing. We seem to have ended up with two Victorias, bearing no clear relationship to each other. How did she go from dancing princess to potato?

  That’s a tale worth telling, but in this book I also want to present a third Victoria. The little old lady, sullen in expression, gloomy in dress, proved to be a remarkably successful queen, one who invented a new role for the monarchy. She found a way of being a respected sovereign in an age when people were deeply uncomfortable with having a woman on the throne.

  Perhaps the Victorians were even less comfortable with women in power than, say, the Tudors, with Elizabeth I, or the Stuarts, with Queen Anne. I believe that Victoria got around this by working out rather a clever way of ruling that we might characterise as stereotypically feminine. She operated by instinct rather than logic, emotion rather than intellect. This turned out to be perfect for an institution like the monarchy. It had lost its cold hard power, but it might – through gesture and spectacle – be able to retain its influence. The accident of her gender turned out to be just what the monarchy needed.

  But what did this cost Victoria as a human being? An awful lot, I think. As well as a queen, she was also a daughter, a wife and a widow, and at each of these steps along life’s journey, she had to perform all sorts of troubling mental contortions to conform to what society demanded of a woman. On the face of it, she was deeply socially conservative. The idea of votes for women, for example, disgusted her. But if you look at her actions rather than her words, she was in fact tearing up the rulebook for how to be female.

  And I’m particularly interested in Victoria’s years as a widow. Her early life was so traumatic and dramatic that biographers in the past have tended to concentrate upon it, and there’s a plethora of books about the young queen.1 But historians have more recently begun to swing the other way, and I stand with them in believing that she became her best self in old age.2 Only in maturity did she come out of the shadow of her husband’s domineering personality, to emerge imperious, eccentric and really rather magnificent.

  People in the process of writing a biography are often asked, do you like your subject? In the case of Victoria, the answer is complex. She could be a monster. Her children could have told you of terrible flaws in her parenting. She could be inconsistent, dictatorial and selfish. But her own horrid upbringing, redeemed only by occasional bright shafts of love and light, means that it would be a stony heart that felt no pity for the human being she was.

  And there’s much to admire too. She was never vain. She was, in her peculiar way, hard-working, and deeply committed to her unchosen task. Her job made impossible demands upon her, and yet there’s a sense of buoyancy about her, and idiosyncrasy, and an energy that sweeps you onto her side. I think that her life was, all things considered, a hard one. Not materially hard, but hard in the sense that enormous wealth and celebrity can put pressure on a human being. She required massive mental resilience. So, do I like her? The answer is yes, initially hesitant, but ultimately resounding.

  And I have also loved telling her story by peering through twenty-four different windows into her life. The idea came to me in 2012 when my colleague Alexandra Kim – we worked together as curators at Queen Victoria’s birthplace, Kensington Palace in London – completed a loan request for a parasol from the Museum of London. Made of black lace, it was the very one carried by Victoria as she drove through London on 22 June 1897 to show herself to the crowds who’d gathered to celebrate her Diamond Jubilee. The parasol was a gift from the ‘Father of the House’ of Commons, Charles Pelham Villiers, Member for Wolverhampton. Aged ninety-five at the time of the jubilee, he’d entered Parliament when Victoria was sixteen, two years short of becoming queen in 1837. He was one of the few people living who could remember what it was like before the long, colourful Victorian age began.

  This parasol was just one item in an exhibition where we attempted to recreate that one particular day when she, and her empire, were perhaps at their zenith. We pulled together intimate items like
the parasol with objects on a grander scale, like a huge model of the late-Victorian London she glimpsed from her carriage. Our exhibition also featured what the millions of her subjects on the streets that day saw, how they celebrated and, indeed, what they criticised. The sight of her colonial troops marching through the streets of London, so many of them, so utterly subordinated, caused some viewers to begin to question the British right to use so much violence in pursuit of so much empire.

  Our exhibition also made me think about how Victoria’s reign gave the monarchy a living legacy; it was opened by Her Majesty the Queen and, watching the flickering film footage of the Diamond Jubilee procession, she commented how remarkable it was that her great-great-grandmother’s carriage had eight horses, a real feat of equestrianism that is hard to match today. Of course, she’d gained the insight from driving in similar processions herself. It was a reminder that many of the traditions and rituals of today’s monarchy were ‘invented’ by Victoria.

  Another reason I decided to follow this principle of recreating individual days in detail was because with Victoria – uniquely – I could. She was a prolific diarist, spilling out millions of words over her lifetime, three or four thousand some evenings. And now they are more accessible than ever because of a wonderful feat of digitisation by the Bodleian Libraries, the Royal Archives and ProQuest, including every single surviving word of the queen’s voluminous journals.

  But the journals can only take us so far. I have also selected important days from her parents’ lives, the date of her own birth and days when her children came into her life and she was too busy to pick up a pen. And it’s also worth remembering even the journals (or especially the journals?) can be false friends. Every Victorian woman who wrote a diary did so with circumspection: secrets revealed could lead to loss and shame. Even as Victoria wrote, she suspected that her words would one day be read. A queen has no privacy. ‘You will be,’ Victoria’s mother told her when she was sixteen, ‘more severely observed than any one else in [the world]. You know that very well yourself.’3

  So Victoria’s journals lay traps for us, leaving us a blandly smiling account of a day containing a desperate quarrel. Or else her past editors have tripped us up by leaving out details that they in their own times thought unimportant. Most notoriously, Victoria’s youngest daughter Beatrice, for example, made transcriptions of her mother’s diaries before burning most of the originals, deleting certain names and incidents as she went. This means we must also probe areas where the journals haven’t got much to say. As historian Paula Bartley points out, Victoria’s eldest son, Bertie, destroyed ‘all the correspondence in the Flora Hastings affair, all the letters to Disraeli if they concerned the family and all the correspondence between the Munshi and his mother’.4 Flora Hastings, Benjamin Disraeli and her Indian bodyservant Abdul Karim, ‘The Munshi’, as he was known, are all therefore characters who will make an extended appearance.

  Later in her life, Victoria published extracts from her journals, using her simple, unpretentious prose very powerfully to describe her love and her grief. Her words were important, but her subjects knew her even better in the form of her unmistakable image, firstly through the work of artists and then, as the century wore on, in the form of those ubiquitous, instantly recognisable photographs. This book tries to conjure up her physical body in words, not from prurience but because so much of the success of her reign lay less in doing than simply in being. The pictures still hold the eye today because there is something so countercultural about them. Why does she not smile? Why does she look so unamused? It’s almost shocking to us today to see a female world leader looking so lugubrious. We forget that 200 years ago, it was surprising to see a female at all.

  I’ve also selected the days when she met people like Florence Nightingale, or the Maharaja Duleep Singh, because of their significance to the age to which Victoria gives her name. No other monarch’s reign has so shaped the world in which we still live. At the end of her life, she was ruling over nearly a quarter of the population of the globe. We’re all still Victoria’s subjects, in the sense that we have a constitutional monarchy, and many of us still follow its births, deaths and marriages with interest. We’re still dealing with the legacy of having seized and lost an empire. We follow the Victorian game of football, travel from London to Birmingham by train, as the Victorians could, and we still (just about) stick the Victorian invention of stamps on letters before placing them in ‘VR’ postboxes.5 The Victorians gave us public lavatories, the underground railway, the nursing profession, the cigarette, the annual seaside holiday. We still enjoy their treats, from curry (one of Victoria’s favourites) to chocolate Easter eggs, Oxo, Rose’s Lime Juice Cordial, Bird’s Custard, Cadbury’s Cocoa and Lyle’s Golden Syrup.6

  What about Albert? Previous historians have very often favoured him at Victoria’s expense, partly, I think, because he had the qualities that historians themselves tend to possess and therefore admire. He was orderly, dispassionate, logical, a thinker rather than a feeler. Of course, he had an impressive intellect. But if you value emotional intelligence as a component of leadership, then you realise that in many ways Victoria outshone him, and you get a new narrative of her reign. Stanley Weintraub, in one of the gold-standard biographies of the queen, concludes that what lingers longest in the memory of her reign is the sad ‘long afternoon of her post-Albert seclusion’.7 But no, what interests me – and indeed many others today, now women’s contributions to history are better recognised – is her eventual return to fiery form. ‘While the Prince Consort lived,’ she told a visitor in the early 1860s, ‘he thought for me, now I have to think for myself.’8

  I hope that seeing her up close, examining her face-to-face, as she lived hour-to-hour through twenty-four days of her life, might help you to imagine meeting her yourself, so that you can form your own opinion on the contradictions at the heart of British history’s most recognisable woman.

  PART ONE

  A Naughty Daughter

  1

  Double Wedding: Kew Palace, 11 July 1818

  Kew Palace, a little brick building peeping out from among the trees in west London’s Kew Gardens, is an unlikely-looking royal palace. You might mistake it for a giant doll’s house. But it has in fact been notorious since the late-Georgian period as both the asylum and prison of George III, who retreated here during his episodes of critical illness. If he were alive today, it’s likely that George III would be treated for bipolar disorder. In his own lifetime, though, people thought him ‘mad’. The king’s ‘madness’ would cast a long shadow over the life of his best-known granddaughter, Queen Victoria.

  In his healthier, happier youth, George III, Victoria’s grandmother Queen Charlotte and their fifteen children had loved visiting their pocket-sized palace in the gardens. ‘Dear little Kew’, Charlotte called it.1 Their home was a seventeenth-century merchant’s dwelling with curved gables, repurposed as a royal hideaway. It was ideally situated for enjoying the botanical wonderland of Kew, which extended from right outside the building’s front door.

  On Saturday 11 July 1818, however, the mood inside Kew Palace was sombre. A curious double wedding was to take place there that afternoon. Two of George III and Queen Charlotte’s sons were simultaneously to marry two German princesses, but in an atmosphere of duty rather than joy.

  Charlotte, the mother of the grooms, was now seventy-four years old. Her fifteen offspring had once played contentedly in the gardens at Kew, but the family once known as ‘the joyous band’ had since been atomised by misfortune. Charlotte’s three final children had died horribly young. Her formerly loving husband became estranged, and was sometimes even crude and cruel towards her as he lost control of his speech and descended into his own incoherent hell. Today he was absent from his sons’ weddings, living as he was under medical supervision at Windsor Castle. There he was said to be ‘perfectly happy, conversing with the Dead’.2

  As well as twelve surviving children, Charlotte also had a si
gnificant number of grandchildren, totalling at least fourteen.3 Yet the wedding party now gathering did so in response to a crisis in the royal line of succession. The problem with George III and Charlotte’s living grandchildren, and the reason for the doubt about their number, was that in 1818 every single one of them was illegitimate, born outside the sanctity of wedlock.

  This extraordinary situation had arisen because George III, a strict father, had been anxious to prevent his children from making inappropriate matches. His Royal Marriages Act of 1772 made it illegal for his progeny to marry without his personal permission. But the unintended consequence had been to discourage his sons – the Royal Dukes – from getting married at all. By the end of the eighteenth century, only three of the seven had taken the plunge. The union of the eldest, the Prince of Wales, had produced just a single daughter – a second Charlotte – before ending in separation. Another brother’s marriage had been undertaken in secret, without royal permission, and was therefore not recognised by law.

  Two of the remaining unmarried Royal Dukes, William, Duke of Clarence, and Edward, Duke of Kent, were now making their way to their mother’s house at Kew in order, at 4 p.m., to attend their own weddings. This double ducal marriage ceremony had been triggered by the recent death, in childbirth, of their niece Princess Charlotte. As the one legitimate royal grandchild, the late princess had been her generation’s only possible monarch.

  For the sake of the succession, then, Princess Charlotte’s death forced her uncles to do their patriotic duty. They were now expected to stop tottering comfortably towards middle age with their mistresses, find themselves proper brides and perpetuate the royal line.

  As Queen Charlotte watched for the arrival of her sons from the sash windows of her first-floor drawing room, her view embraced a bizarre landscape. The dinky toy palace in which she sat was positioned within a royal compound that included several other mansions, since destroyed, where princes had once dwelt. Nearby on the riverbank stood the unfinished turrets of the Castellated Palace, a bonkers construction begun but not completed by George III. It was aptly described as a building in which princesses might be ‘detained by giants or enchanters – an image of distempered reason’.4 The leafy landscape, bordered by the Thames, was studded with the temples, follies and palaces of a royal family that liked to retreat to its fantastical garden world for refreshment and rehabilitation.