by Lucy Worsley
Witnessing this process of disintegration, the people around her treated Victoria with a toxic mixture of concern and control. There was genuine fear that she would ‘go mad’ like her grandfather, but this could hopefully be avoided if she were placed under the right sort of regime. Dr Ferguson noted down that Victoria ‘is much troubled as to what will become of her when she is dead. She thinks of worms eating her – and is weeping & wretched.’46 But he believed, as did many of the household, that the solution lay in Albert. ‘Providence has shielded her,’ Ferguson thought, ‘in giving her a husband whose patience and example may perfect those good emotions which he has already called out – nothing else will save her sooner or later from madness.’47 Dr Clark also thought she must be kept completely calm, ‘free from all neural irritation’ or ‘mental exertion’. ‘I feel at times uneasy,’ he admitted, ‘regarding the Q’s mind.’48
Surely Victoria’s mental health suffered because all the men around her expected it to. But her increasingly negative views about childbirth were also a consequence of the changing emotional climate of her age. During the span of her life, emotion in general became less readily expressed, less openly admitted. Albert’s attempts to get her to control her emotional excesses were partly personal, partly part of a wider cultural trend. ‘You have again lost your self-control quite unnecessarily,’ he would tell her after an argument. ‘I do my duty towards you even though it means that life is embittered by “scenes”.’49
Slowly, gradually, she began to check her feelings, to avoid angering or clashing with Albert. And Victoria began, as a result, to love her children a little less. In her thirties, she had hard words for her own daughter Vicky, when Vicky herself was grown up and about to make her a grandmother. Avoid ‘baby worship,’ she told the daughter she had once adored so passionately, because ‘no lady, and still less a Princess, is fit for her husband or her position, if she does that.’50 Victoria had once rushed home to see Vicky being bathed at night, but with the younger children it was a ritual she witnessed only ‘once in three months perhaps.’51 ‘One is very foolish with one’s first child,’ she recollected.52 She came to think of maternity as ‘the shadow side’ of life.53
In their rows over their children, Albert could be bitter, devastating and unfair. Victoria’s doctor, he claimed, had not looked after Vicky correctly. ‘Dr Clark,’ Albert raved, ‘has mismanaged the child and poisoned her with calomel and you have starved her. I shall have nothing more to do with it; take the child away and do as you like and if she dies you will have it on your conscience.’54 There was much to excuse Albert in writing this. He was only twenty-two at the time. He had two children already and a third on the way. He was living in a strange country, and felt he occupied a humiliating, subordinate position both in household and nation.
And yet these are not the phrases of the wise, kind, generous paragon that Victoria paints for us in almost every single one of the many, many words she was to write about her husband. The success of their family life – one suspects the same of so many Victorian families – lay in her seeing only what she wanted to see, and subordinating her own desires to his. She constantly excused him. ‘My chief and great anxiety is – peace in the House … God only knows how I love him,’ she wrote, on the day of Albert’s outburst. ‘His position is difficult, heaven knows, and we must do everything to make it easier.’55 She submitted herself to Albert almost as her mother had submitted herself to Conroy, calling him her father, protector, guide, advisor, even ‘my mother (I might almost say) as well as my husband’.56 Her courtiers had once thought her indomitably self-willed, a ‘resolute little tit’.57 ‘I suppose,’ Victoria now finished, that ‘no-one ever was so completely altered in every way’.58
One of the prices of her elevation of Albert was the loss of Lehzen, her second mother. Her husband had always seen Lehzen as a rival for Victoria’s love and attention and, at the end of 1842, he’d engineered her departure from Windsor. Taking a leaf out of Albert’s book, Victoria did not even say goodbye to her old governess. She admitted much ‘regret not being able to embrace her once more,’ but contented herself with writing a farewell letter instead.59
Lehzen went back to her native Germany to live in retirement. Years later, when Victoria was travelling near Lehzen’s home, the governess came to the railway platform at Bückeburg station to wave her handkerchief at her former pupil ‘in enthusiastic greeting’.60 The train did not stop.
At Christmas, though, all this was forgotten. For the wider household, the festivities began with the ceremony of gift-giving. Maid-of-honour Eleanor Stanley describes how in December 1843 she was called with her colleagues into the Oak Room at Windsor Castle. Victoria and Albert stood by a table with a tree upon it, handing out gifts ‘with the name of each person, written by the Queen on a slip of paper’. Eleanor’s own present was a necklace, ‘in carbuncles and little diamonds’.61 Those lower down the social scale got less beautiful, more functional gifts. The queen’s dressers, for example, received something like a ‘necéssaire’, a little leather case containing thimble, scissors and bodkin.62
Windsor Castle under Albert’s direction now ran like clockwork. After centuries of inattention and mismanagement by its sovereigns, the royal household as an institution had by Victoria’s accession come almost to a creaking halt. One unfortunate guest to Windsor, unable to find a footman to direct him, spent ‘nearly an hour wandering about the corridors to try and identify his bedroom. At length, he opened a random door in desperation’, only to discover the queen, having her hair brushed.63 He had happened upon her bedroom.
Now things were much better managed. Another visitor to Windsor, a Madame Bunsen, described what it was like to be invited to stay at the castle. She found that ‘a comfortable set of rooms were awaiting me. The upper housemaid gave us tea and bread and butter – very refreshing.’ After she’d dressed for dinner, one of the lords-in-waiting showed Madame Bunsen the way along ‘the Grand Corridor’, which was ‘a fairy scene, lights, pictures, moving figures of courtiers unknown’.64 This wide, curved room – so much more than its name suggests – was described as ‘the main street, so to speak, whereon all the rooms in constant use by the Queen’s family open, and is in itself a museum of art’.65
Madame Bunsen was led onwards, through multitudinous apartments, ‘which we passed through one after another till we reached the magnificent ballroom’. There she was joined by a growing gathering of other guests, until two gentlemen entered simultaneously, turned back upon themselves and made ‘profound bows towards the open door’. The very moment Victoria appeared, the band began to play ‘God Save the Queen’. After dinner and drawing-room chat, it was at half past eleven that Madame Bunsen set back out ‘on my travels to my bedchamber’. She could not remember where it was, and ‘might have looked and wandered some miles’. But this time there was someone to show her the way.66
Albert had entrenched himself not only as the paterfamilias of a large family, but also as his wife’s financial controller. He cut her dress expenditure down from £5,000 to £2,000 a year.67 He’d taken it upon himself to save enough money to build up the private fortune that neither of them would inherit. Parliament allowed Victoria nearly £400,000 a year. With her additional income from the Duchy of Lancaster, an estate attached to the monarchy, and with a stripped-down, more stringently run establishment, Victoria had been able not only to pay off her father’s debts, but also to start to save.68 By 1850, Albert had amassed enough money to enable them to think about building a new house of their own, something more to his taste, more cosy and convenient than this vast old castle in which neither of them felt entirely at home.
It was always chilly and draughty at Windsor. Although ‘the cold’ always made Victoria herself feel ‘well and brisk’, her household disagreed.69 ‘Three Princesses lame with chilblains, two Princes in disgrace, and Louise ill in her room,’ wrote governess Laddle in the midwinter of 1851. ‘The Queen has a stiff neck, Mr Wellesley a sore thr
oat, sun not shining, cold wind, all dull and disagreeable enough.’70 One Christmas Eve Laddle had asked Albert to look over the quarterly accounts she kept for the nursery. ‘Yes certainly,’ he said, ‘if you will consent to my doing reel steps all the time to warm myself.’71 And yet he did love Windsor Castle in the snow, when he took his whole family skating.
The Christmas Day of 1850 at Windsor was spent as always in a simple manner. There was unusually mild weather for the family’s walk down through the park ‘with the Children to the Kennels’. The princes and princesses there gave presents of toys and dress fabric to the children of a family of Scottish servants. Then it was back to the castle’s private chapel for the service at eleven. These walks, to the kennels, to the stables or to the farms to inspect the stock, frequently undertaken at ‘Christmastide’, were part of the duties of a responsible landowner. They demonstrated the values that Albert was trying to instil in his children.72 The management of the extensive royal estates was a microcosm for the management of the kingdom, so a visit to the farm was, in effect, an act of good government.
Then came a convivial lunch of foie gras and tapioca pudding, served ‘quite in a new style’ according to one of the ladies-in-waiting. The children were getting big enough to be considered able to eat ‘all together, Queen, prince, children, Gentlemen & ladies & the children’s governess – this was an enormous novelty’.73 In the afternoon Victoria ‘went several times to look at my beautiful presents’, she notes, before ‘the trees were lit up in the evening, & the Children were all playing about so happily’.74
Meanwhile preparations were underway for the great Christmas dinner, ‘always a gay, merry one’. The sideboard, as ever, held an enormous ‘Baron of Beef’, served alongside game pie and brawn.75 This Christmas dinner would be served to Victoria, Albert and twenty assorted household members and guests.76 The ‘table-deckers’, a small team responsible for laying the table, checked the silver cutlery out of the Silver Pantry, a small strongroom staffed by some ‘veritable giants of men’ muscular enough to lift the royal collection’s heavier pieces. Either the ‘Lion’ set of knives and forks, or else the other set marked with the ‘Crown’, would make its way to the table, each set inscribed upon its handles with its own symbol, and used on alternate nights.77 The table-deckers also had to prepare centrepieces, flowers and glassware.
Down below in the kitchens, the baron of beef, a huge lump of meat 400 lb in weight, was roasted on a spit turned by ‘great iron chains driven round constantly by a machine’. ‘That was indeed a roast beef,’ exclaimed one of the queen’s dressers, who’d never seen anything like it before.78 Meanwhile, on another spit were ‘at least fifty turkeys’.79 The great kitchens of Windsor were a magnificent sight in all the uproar of roasting, coppers hanging ‘like burnished shields’ above the two 12-foot closed ranges, and ‘six rows of large joints’ before the open ranges, revolving on their spits and shielded from view behind ‘a meat screen about ten feet high’. Despite Albert’s cutbacks, everything about these kitchens was over the top, including the staff list of master-cook, two yeomen, two assistant cooks, two roasting cooks, sixteen apprentices and half a dozen kitchen maids. Even the sand on the floors to soak up spills was not stinted: it was ‘swept up and renewed half a dozen times a day’.80
Albert had the self-control to follow the occasional fasting day, for the good of an irritable stomach that often plagued him, but for the rest of the family there was always a superabundance of food at the castle. A quiet, low-key dinner for Victoria, Albert and just their eldest daughter, Vicky, for example, served in 1857, consisted of a choice of soups or fish, then between proffered alternatives of roast beef or ‘capon with asparagus’. The side dishes were ‘vol-au-vents with béchamel sauce and grilled eggs,’ followed by apricot flan or waffles ‘mit crème’.81
Christmas dinner 1850 was still served in the old-fashioned style with all the dishes laid out at once like a buffet, rather than in separate courses. Service à la Française, as this was called, was predicated on waste: there would be too much of everything, that was the point. But there was also a well-established system for dealing with the leftovers, which worked their way down the social scale. For example, after the queen’s dinner at around 9.30 p.m., the upper servants sat down to her leftover roast as cold cuts, and what was left after that was given to designated charities. In December 1855, 650 members of the ‘poor of Windsor’ were fed with the scraps from the Windsor Castle kitchens.
By Christmas 1850, the court was a more sober place than it had been in the past. Albert had forced through reductions so that family and guests were now allowed only a daily bottle of wine per person.82 The downside of becoming an abstemious, respectable royal family, as Albert wished, was that the court was no longer the centre of scintillating society and intellectual endeavour that some of its predecessors had been. Nor did it have the glamorous, if raffish, qualities of King George IV’s. ‘The dullness of our evenings,’ wrote one maid-of-honour, ‘is a thing impossible to describe.’ After dinner, the ladies-in-waiting generally made laboured conversation with the queen and whichever bigwigs were sitting at her table while the maids-of-honour quietly plied their needles. At 10.30 Victoria would give the signal that everyone could retire, at which the ‘gentlemen make a rush, from the whist table or from the other room, and we gladly bundle up our work, and all is over’.83
But at Christmas, at least, a little merriment crept into the proceedings. ‘How I lived to tell the tale I don’t know,’ reports Windsor guest Lord Torrington in 1860. He ate baron of beef, boar’s head and a woodcock pie containing 100 birds for dinner, spent the evening playing pool and billiards and finally went to his bed ‘near three o’clock’.84
Lord Torrington painted a picture of a perfect, convivial, family Christmas in his account of the Windsor festivities of 1860, addressing his account to the editor of The Times. Although it was not published, Victoria was pleased, on other occasions, by the attention the press paid to her growing family. ‘They say,’ she claimed, ‘no Sovereign was more loved than I am (I am bold enough to say) and that, from our happy domestic home – wh. gives such a good example.’85 The Illustrated London News, for one, was always hungry for stories both about royalty and about Christmas, depicting the latter as a heart-warming family festival, which reflected the domestic preoccupations of middle-class people. Through its decorations and gift-giving, the Victorian Christmas created a lucrative new opportunity for the members of a capitalist society to sell things to each other. One American journalist, lacking solid information, decided instead simply to imagine what went on at Christmas at Windsor. He gives Albert the (unconvincing) speech, ‘Mother, we must have a first-class shindy for the children’, to which Victoria (somewhat implausibly) responds: ‘Albert, we will just make things whoop.’86
A special supplement to one edition of the Illustrated London News in 1848 included a highly influential picture of Victoria, Albert, their children and their tree. It showed them enjoying the classic mid-Victorian moment, celebrating both the wonderful new trappings of Christmas and solid family values. Any middle-class family could aspire to live like this, and like them. In talking so proudly about her ‘happy domestic home’, Victoria was prefiguring the words of John Ruskin, the commentator who’d make the best-known pronouncement on the proper role of a Victorian woman. Home, he thought, was a ‘woman’s true place and power’. While a husband had to go to brave the rough world’s perils, a wife should remain behind, in a private realm where her ‘great function is Praise’ and her great opportunity the ‘sweet ordering’ of her household.87
Ironically, Victoria herself had little talent for ‘sweet ordering’, and delegated all that to Albert. And historian Margaret Homans has argued that the royal family’s public image, so surprisingly ordinary and middle-class, was in fact nothing more than an illusion. That powerful, relatable image of the family Christmas tree made newspaper readers look twice because everyone who saw it really knew in their
hearts that the people in the picture weren’t ordinary and middle-class at all.
‘Never was there a more tender love, nor so incessant a performance of every conjugal duty,’ wrote Laddle of life in the royal family, and the word ‘performance’ is telling.88 Normal middle-class families didn’t live in an ancient castle, or have quite so many Christmas trees. They didn’t have 100 woodcocks in their pies, or dispense diamond necklaces to ladies-in-waiting. But Victoria’s polished ‘ordinariness’ was a clever – or perhaps even just a completely instinctive – way of ruling over a country that was not comfortable with women in power.89
So the happy family Christmas of 1850, drawing to a close with a late bedtime, was not quite what it seemed, and the increasingly stout little woman at the heart of it not quite what she seemed either. Arthur Ponsonby, son of one of Victoria’s Private Secretaries, claimed that she was nothing like an aristocrat, or a wealthy middle-class Englishwoman, or a typical princess. He wrote that:
such expressions as ‘people like Queen Victoria’ or ‘that sort of woman’ could not be used about her. Her simple domesticity appealed to a vast number of her subjects; she was intensely human, but the unique nature of her personality and position claimed special attention … she was simply without prefix or suffix ‘The Queen’. 90
14
A Maharaja on the Isle of Wight, 21–24 August 1854
Early in the afternoon of Monday 21 August 1854, a young Indian prince was steaming across the Solent. This was the Maharaja Duleep Singh, once the ruler of the Sikh Kingdom. Son of Ranjit Singh, the powerful ‘Lion of the Punjab’, Duleep had not been allowed to occupy his father’s throne for long. At the age of ten, after a period of joint rule, he was deposed by the British. Now he was fifteen, exiled from his home and paying his first visit to the Isle of Wight.