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

by Lucy Worsley

  She was just a short distance behind. As she left the dressing room, her trainbearers walking behind her in pairs, she passed crowds of servants, courtiers and guests, ‘ranged on seats one higher than the other, as also in the Guard room, and by the Staircase, – all very friendly’.49 Unlike Albert, she’d learned that she must walk with dignity, ‘very slowly, giving ample time for all the spectators to gratify their curiosity, and certainly she was never before more earnestly scrutinized’. She was used to it, but even so people saw her shaking.

  At the coronation her train had been too long to handle, but now there was the opposite problem. The long back part of Victoria’s white satin skirt, trimmed with orange blossom, was ‘rather too short for the number of young ladies who carried it’ and they ended up ‘kicking each other’s heels and treading on each other’s gowns’.50 Even so, after a discordant fanfare of trumpets, they got Victoria up the aisle. At its head, she ‘threw herself on her knees at the foot of the altar as if her whole soul was in the petition she was offering up for a blessing’.51 It brought a wobble to many a lip. ‘She looked very pale and pretty, and her hands trembled very much,’ recorded one spectator.52

  Victoria now takes up the description of what she saw before her: ‘At the Altar, to my right, stood my precious Angel; Mama was on my left … Lord Melbourne stood close to me with the Sword of State. The Ceremony was very imposing, and fine and simple, and I think ought to make an everlasting impression.’53 For her whole life she would favour a ‘simple’ religious ceremony and wasn’t attracted by the contemporary High Church movement towards Rome. She would even, in due course, cause some official dismay by taking part in the ‘low’ services of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland.

  The words were exactly the same as any other wedding ceremony, and the couple just called themselves ‘Albert’ and ‘Victoria’. When the Archbishop asked Victoria if she promised to ‘obey’ her husband, he got a strong, loud, positive response.54 She wanted to obey. And everyone present could clearly see this intention. ‘She turned her sweet & innocent looks upon him,’ wrote on observer, ‘with an expression that brought tears into every eye … they left the chapel together hand in hand.’55 Royal marriages were not expected to contain this element of giddy high romance, but Victoria’s mother had taught her that this was how love should look. It just remained to be seen how sustainable this mode of marriage would be for a royal life.

  At a quarter to one, the firing of guns alerted the whole of London to the very moment Albert ‘placed the ring on the finger’.56 Even the weather took notice, and ‘a nice gleam of sunshine appeared’. The nervous entrance of the groom and his pent-up bride had been difficult to watch, ‘for I know not which looked the most uncomfortable’, but now, as they went out, ‘they each had a colour; and with countenances much brightened’.

  There were, however, some unhappy faces in the congregation. Victoria’s mother ‘looked disconsolate and distressed’, people saw, with ‘the traces of tears on her countenance’.57 She had reason to cry. At each step of her daughter’s progress – accession, coronation, marriage – Victoire’s role had shrunk. She was being pushed further and further away from the power she had once thought might be hers. And now even Lehzen too was being superseded. Her pale face attracted ‘considerable attention’ in the dark corner where she sat, ‘white as marble, which appeared all the whiter by contrast with her black velvet Spanish hat’.58 Victoria’s life as daughter and surrogate daughter was now over. Victoire realised this, but Lehzen did not, and would find it painful to learn.

  Next came the signing of the register, then it was time to return to Buckingham Palace. The bridesmaids ‘consigned the train to Prince Albert’s care, who seemed a little nervous about getting into the carriage with a lady with a tail six yards long’.59 And at last she and he were alone together, for the short journey to the wedding breakfast. Again the ‘crowd was immense’, Victoria recorded, and the palace ‘full of people, they cheered us again and again’.60 Victoria and Albert were ‘observed to squeeze each other’s hands’.61 It was a signal that they should escape, to sit on the sofa in her dressing room for half an hour. Here they exchanged solemn words. Albert decreed that there should ‘never be any secrets between us’. Much later, years later, when many things in their world had changed, Victoria added a poignant comment to her record of this moment. ‘& so it was,’ she wrote.62

  But Victoria had her social duty to do, and a feast was waiting below. ‘I talked to all after the breakfast,’ she recorded, ‘and to Lord Melbourne whose fine coat I praised.’ She and Albert drank a reconciliatory ‘glass of wine’ with Melbourne, and he ‘seemed much affected by the whole’.63 Then she went to change, putting on ‘a white silk gown trimmed with swansdown’, and a going-away bonnet trimmed with false orange flowers that still survives to this day at Kensington Palace. Then ‘we took leave of Mama and drove off … I and Albert alone, which was so delightful’.64

  They travelled to Windsor followed by just a small escort of three other coaches.65 In one of them came Lehzen. The scale of the ceremony was tapering off, but there was still ‘an immense crowd of people outside the Palace’ and the roads were lined all the way to Windsor with spectators whose cheers were ‘quite deafening’.66 No fewer than thirty triumphal arches had been constructed across the road for the newly-weds to drive beneath. People also placed cut-out paper shades in their windows all along Windsor High Street so that the town glowed with ‘crowns, stars and all the brilliant devices which gas and oil could supply’.67

  Victoria’s cheering ‘subjects took the rain as quietly as if it had been a passing April shower’.68 The unpopularity she’d earned over Flora had passed like a shower too. This wedding was wonderful politics. Unlike previous royal weddings, writes historian Paula Bartley, it was ‘a demonstration of love and respectability’. This was a completely new way of doing things, yet done with such panache that it seemed like things had always been done this way. It was, in Eric Hobsbawm’s phrase, ‘the invention of tradition’.69

  At last, by seven, Victoria and Albert were back at Windsor, and retreated to what was now their joint suite of rooms. ‘After looking about our rooms for a little while, I went and changed my gown,’ Victoria tells us, putting on her third outfit of the day. Any of their days together would be incomplete without music, and when she went through to Albert’s new sitting room, she found him playing the piano. ‘He had put on his Windsor coat,’ she says, and ‘he took me on his knee, and kissed me.’ The gown that Victoria wore that evening was possibly the plainer, and very slender, cream silk one surviving in the Royal Collection with a traditional association with her wedding evening. If she did wear it for that first dinner together, then she could hardly have eaten a thing. It laced even tighter than her wedding dress.

  But she did not eat, because reaction from all the excitement was setting in. ‘We had our dinner in our sitting room,’ Victoria records, but her ‘sick headache’ meant that she couldn’t manage the cherry soufflé.70 They talked ‘of many family affairs’.71 Her headache meant that she was obliged to lie down ‘for the remainder of the evening, on the sofa’. Even so, it was delightful:

  I never, never spent such an evening!! My dearest dearest dear Albert sat on a footstool by my side, and his excessive love and affection gave me feelings of heavenly love and happiness, I never could have hoped to have felt before! He clasped me in his arms, and we kissed each other again and again!

  But there would be no ritual undoing by the groom of his bride’s ethereal gown. That, as always, had to be done by Victoria’s dressers. ‘At ½ p.10 I went and undressed and was very sick,’ she says. These women, the bedrock of her life, ever present, ever watchful, must have been with her as she finished retching and went into the bedchamber, where ‘we both went to bed; (of course in one bed), to lie by his side, and in his arms, and on his dear bosom’.72 Their wedding night continued the serious, almost sombre mood of the evening. There was ‘purity and religion in
it all’, Victoria remembered afterwards, recording that ‘we did not sleep much’.73

  The next morning, ‘poor Albert was feeling very poorly,’ Victoria reported, ‘& had to remain quiet in his room.’ But later the very same day his social obligations once again began, with a dinner for ten.74

  In fact, the honeymoon in Windsor would only last four days. Its shortness, and Victoria’s public appearances during it, were seized upon as ‘indelicate’,75 Albert would have liked to spend longer away, but his wife told him that they couldn’t. ‘I am the Sovereign,’ she reminded him, and ‘business can stop and wait for nothing.’76

  Albert grumbled to a friend that he was ‘only the husband, and not the master in the house.’77 And yet, as a contemporary advice book put it, ‘it is unquestionably the right of all men … to be treated with deference, and made much of in their own houses’.78 According to the model of Victorian marriage, something here was amiss. Victoria had said one thing, she had promised to ‘obey’. Yet she was doing another, placing her work before her husband. ‘The Gruncher’, hostile witness as he was, saw this clearly. Her strain and sickness in the weeks before the wedding, he thought, had been caused by doubts about Albert, by her ‘dread of being thwarted, and her love of power, stronger than love’.79 Albert swallowed the short honeymoon without making a fuss, but in fact he was merely biding his time before beginning to readjust the power balance between himself and his wife.

  Even if she hardly valued it at the time, Victoria had lost something as well as gaining a husband and the prospect of the family life her childhood had lacked. Historian John Plunkett points out that this loss was symbolised in the changes now made at Madame Tussauds waxworks display. The coronation tableau was replaced in 1840 by a marriage group. Queen had been shrunk down to wife.80

  12

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

  In the early hours of Saturday 21 November 1840, lights were lit at Buckingham Palace. Victoria’s first labour had begun. But everyone’s thoughts went back to another November night, almost exactly twenty-three years before. That was the night of the ‘Triple Obstetrical Tragedy’, deaths that had resulted in the Baby Race and Victoria’s own conception.

  The memory of what had gone wrong for the short-lived Princess Charlotte, the cousin Victoria never knew, placed extra pressure upon her first pregnancy. In childhood Victoria had loved visiting the English home of her Uncle Leopold at Claremont House in Surrey. There she would talk to ‘dear old Louis’, the former devoted dresser ‘and friend’ of Leopold’s late wife. ‘Old Louis’ had been with Charlotte the night she’d died, and had much to tell Victoria about the cousin whose place she’d taken as queen.

  The doctor overseeing Charlotte’s fatal fifty-hour labour, Sir Richard Croft, afterwards came in for heavy criticism. He was berated for his failure to use forceps to get out Charlotte’s stillborn son, and for the way he bled her heavily and denied her food. Harassed and depressed, Croft subsequently shot himself. By his corpse was found a copy of Shakespeare’s plays, opened to reveal the line ‘Fair Sir, God save you! Where is the Princess?’

  As footmen from Buckingham Palace began to pound the knockers of homes across the capital in the darkness before dawn of 21 November 1840, Victoria’s medical team must have been astonished to receive the message that labour had begun. No one was expecting the baby just yet.

  Dr James Clark was woken up, as were the celebrated accoucheurs Dr Charles Locock and Dr Robert Ferguson. The latter had a sideline in mental health, and they were partners in ‘the highest midwifery business in the metropolis’.1 A messenger was also sent to Mr Richard Blagden. As a surgeon, he was socially inferior to the physicians. He had to be willing to get his hands dirty and, if necessary, cut a baby out. Mr Blagden was battle-hardened from his nights on duty at Queen Charlotte’s Lying-In Hospital, the first in Britain ‘to have compassion on unmarried women with their first child’.2

  Hard upon the heels of any concern for the queen’s well-being in the minds of these men must have been the fate of Sir Richard Croft, and what might happen to them if anything went wrong.

  It wasn’t the British way to announce a royal pregnancy, even though in the goldfish bowl of the palace Victoria’s staff soon became aware of it. She conceived distressingly soon after the wedding. ‘I was in for it at once,’ she wrote, ‘& furious I was.’ Perhaps it was the knowledge of Princess Charlotte’s fate that had caused her anguish. She had ‘the greatest horror of having children, and would rather have none’.3 But she also knew that she had no choice, and indeed had a lifelong horror of birth control too. A queen ‘never appears so queenly, so true a woman, as when surrounded by her children’, wrote one Victorian educator.4

  As early as the April following the February wedding, ‘it was known & understood’ by Victoria’s household that she was ‘in an interesting condition’.5 Melbourne advised that she must continue to attend court events, even if she wasn’t able to stand up – as etiquette required – for very long.

  And it turned out that this first pregnancy of hers rather suited Victoria. She was ‘wonderfully well’, she claimed, ‘really the Doctors say they never saw anybody so well … I take long Walks, some in the highest wind, every day, & am so active.’6 Her pharmacist’s account book suggests that she suffered from the occasional headache, which was treated with ‘cooling lotion’ and – that universal panacea – castor oil.7 Contemporary medical advice recommended that she avoid sexual intercourse and ‘all masculine and fatiguing employments’.8 This particular author, Dr William Bull, was clearly addressing the literate, middle-class readers who might buy his book: working women simply had to go on working. But for those who could afford doctors, the scandal of Charlotte’s death had caused something of an upheaval in medical practice. Charlotte had been severely bled throughout her pregnancy and illness, but Dr Bull now vigorously condemned the removal of blood.9

  Friday, the day before Victoria’s labour began, was in no way remarkable. She spent it resting, writing letters, chatting to Melbourne and playing Mozart on the piano.10 She had dinner with Lehzen, as usual, a meal of ‘potage a la Tête de Veau’ (beef brain soup) and grouse.11 She and Albert stayed up until nearly eleven. It was only in the early hours of Saturday that she began to feel ‘very uncomfortable’. With some difficulty, she woke up her husband. Dr Clark came into their bedroom at half past two, but thought that it was a false alarm and went away again. It was at four in the morning that Victoria again insisted, ‘with great firmness’, that she needed her medical team.12

  Dr Ferguson arrived at Buckingham Palace at six, and found his colleagues already present in ‘a little room, heated by insufferably hot air and gas’. Because it was so early, both in the morning and in the pregnancy, the doctors were disorganised, and had not agreed who would do what. Victoria also allowed Lehzen to get involved in the discussions, which quickly became unhelpful. ‘We were left to make out our respective positions during the very brunt of attendance,’ Ferguson admitted, ‘a most unwise, and unsafe plan.’ He was cross because a few months previously he’d ‘written to Clark to ascertain what was expected from each of us – but with no definite answer’.13

  Dr Charles Locock, the head obstetrician, nevertheless managed to soothe the patient. ‘The Baby was on the way & everything was all right,’ he said. This was better. All she’d wanted was reassurance. ‘I did not feel at all nervous,’ was Victoria’s later claim.14 For his part, Locock might well have felt uneasy on behalf of his short, small-boned patient, whose physique was not obviously suited to childbearing.

  As well as displaying notable sangfroid, the young queen exhibited little of the vaunted Victorian quality of modesty. Later in life her views would change, but now, in her twenties, the queen’s ease with her body rather shocked her doctors. It was customary, when a doctor arrived at a contemporary confinement, for him to request permission to ‘make an examination’ through a female friend of the patient. It w
as equally customary – ‘from false modesty’ – for this to be refused, until the pregnant woman’s pains grew bad enough to destroy her inhibitions.15 But concerns for Victoria’s health throughout her childhood had got her thoroughly accustomed to doctors. This was even to the extent that Dr Locock, physician to the Westminster General Lying-In Hospital, found his royal patient’s frankness rather distressing.

  Locock had a reputation among his male companions as ‘light hearted and genial, a pleasant, vivid talker, a lover of news, a good storyteller’, and he doubtless owed some of his medical success ‘to his social qualities’.16 It’s telling that he had specialised in midwifery for the better money, and unfortunately he is on record as trying to impress his high-society friends with gossip that was disrespectful and crude. His views were as frank as he claimed the queen herself to be. Every statement that he made, Locock declared, ‘was invariably considered by Her Majesty in the least delicate sense’.17 Garrulous, judgemental Locock does not give the impression of being on the same side as his patient. In later years, when chloroform was available to ease the pain, he thought it was wrong of Victoria to insist upon using it. It only made labour last longer, Locock thought.18 He often found himself ‘not a little digusted with the Queen’s manner’, and Victoria was clearly annoyed in return by her obstetrician’s delicate doublespeak.19 ‘Those nasty doctors’ was an item she once included in a list of the downsides of childbirth.20

  Dr Locock was also indiscreet enough to share his views on his pregnant patient’s shape, which he thought ‘ugly & enormously fat’. She had left off wearing stays, becoming ‘more like a barrel than anything else’.21 Victoria herself, although she felt well, ‘unhappily’ had to admit that she was ‘a great size’.22 A fine cotton lawn petticoat from this early married period, which once had the same dimensions as her wedding dress, shows evidence of having been let out around its high empire waist, quite possibly to accommodate this pregnancy.23 The work was done with tiny stitches as if by the needle of a fairy. There were many hands available in Victoria’s wardrobe department, and indeed no shortage of clothes either. This particular petticoat survives because it was given away after becoming soiled with blood. She also had an expandable dressing gown for pregnancy, of thin white cotton, with ‘gauging tapes’ to widen the waist as pregnancy progressed.24