by Lucy Worsley
Life at the Swiss cottage sounds pleasantly domesticated, but the royal children also used it for wickedness and war. It was behind the cottage that they’d meet up for an illicit smoke, something even the girls enjoyed. When they inevitably got detected because of the smell, Alice thought it most unfair that she was punished while her brothers were forgiven.36 Arthur, the third brother, had made himself master of the wooden cannon defending the fortification at the back of the Swiss cottage.37 When given a military uniform for Christmas, Arthur got into it at once, seized his ‘little rifle’ and ‘took a pot-shot at his papa’.38 He would end up as field marshal of the army that expanded his mother’s empire to its most bloated state towards the end of her reign.39
At mid-morning, the children took Duleep down to the beach.40 Here, in 1847, Victoria had for the very first time ‘bathed in the sea … I thought it delightful till I put my head under water.’41 Her bathing machine, a wooden hut on wheels, would roll her into the waves so that she could emerge through its curtained doorway and descend its five porch steps directly into the water. The queen’s machine later spent many years being used as a chicken coop before recently being returned to its original place on the beach. The children, too, learned to swim from this beach, in the safety of ‘a well-arranged floating bath’ invented for the purpose by Albert.42 There was no time for swimming today, though, for it was back to the house, where tents for the estate workers, tenants and servants had been erected on the lawn. As Victoria and her children inspected the encampment, greeting the guests, Arthur was seen ‘taking the Maharajah’s hand.’43
The senior members of the household thought the annual Osborne fête a chore. Governess Laddle thought it ‘noisy, merry and intensely boring’, the ‘footmen and housemaids pounding away their ale’.44 Victoria’s journal, though, shows that the children took a less jaundiced view. ‘It was very gay,’ she says, particularly when the gentlemen of the household ‘took part in running races, playing leap frog &c’. There was juggling, blind man’s buff, a wheelbarrow race and dipping for oranges. And ‘no one enjoyed it more’ than Duleep Singh, ‘who laughed heartily & was greatly amused. Our Children were constantly near him & chatting with him & he carried little Leopold [the newest baby] who is so fond of him, in his arms.’45 It seems that after three days in the company of other children, the Maharaja remembered at last that he too was a boy.
Duleep departed from Osborne the next morning, but he left behind some of his wonderful wardrobe so that Affie and Arthur could be photographed in the costume of Sikh princes. Martial little Arthur looks insouciant in his turban, while Affie, always a melancholy soul, adopts the noble, downward gaze of the dispossessed prince himself, while wearing what looks suspiciously like his mother’s necklace of pearls.46
Victoria was sorry to see Duleep go. ‘I take quite a maternal interest in him,’ she wrote, and hoped he might ‘be kept as good & innocent, as he is at present’.47 Lord Dalhousie of India, for his part, considered that her compassion for the ex-prince was ‘superfluous … he will have a good and regular income all his life, and will die in his bed like a gentleman’.48 Dalhousie thought it was most unfortunate that Victoria had shown the prince such favour. After he’d been so intimate with the royal family at Osborne, how would Duleep Singh stomach taking off his shoes, as he must, as a sign of respect in the presence of India’s governor general?
The guests gone, the servants’ ball over, Victoria and Albert retreated into their own company: ‘We dined alone, read, & played.’49 Victoria described an evening like this, without the responsibility for entertaining or being entertained, as her ideal. ‘I sit on a sofa,’ she explains, reading by lamp- and candlelight, with ‘Albert sitting in a low arm-chair, on the opposite side of the table with another small table in front of him on which he usually stands his book’.
Their idea of being ‘alone’, though, did not exclude servants. As she and Albert passed the time ‘talking over the company’, Victoria also gives details of how her ‘maids would come in and begin to undress me – and he would go on talking, and would make his observations on my jewels and ornaments and give my people good advice as to how to keep them or would occasionally reprimand if anything had not been carefully attended to’.50
Once you know that Victoria’s treasured evenings with her husband involved him castigating the servants who were undressing her, it doesn’t sound like quite such a snug domestic idyll. In this closed environment of Osborne, Albert would exert ever greater control over his family and his wife. ‘Four weeks of success in the hard struggle for self-control,’ he would commend Victoria the following year, praising her for suppressing the emotions and anger that upset him.51 ‘The queen is married just as any other woman is,’ Victoria claimed, ‘and swears to obey her lord and master’.52
Cultural historian Adrienne Munich points out that with his dominance and her submission they were simply acting out the plot of so many mid-Victorian novels, in which a spirited woman is ‘humbled by difficulties in her encounters with the world; then, softened by passion, she serves her happy days by submitting to a man’. Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch (1871–2), the heroine of Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849) and of Mrs Gaskell’s North and South (1855) all make the same journey.53
But rows nevertheless still occurred because Victoria did not always quite submit. One of the points of issue was the limited amount of time that they were able to spend together like this. In shielding her from government business by taking so much of it upon himself, Albert kept himself hideously busy, and denied his wife the company she ardently desired. Albert’s dedication to his self-perceived duty bordered on the dysfunctional. Wanting to please him, Victoria ‘kept every letter and box to tell & show him.’ Yet she dreaded showing him ‘any foolish draft or despatch’ as she ‘knew it would distress and irritate him’.54
Albert’s irritation was a signal of trouble to come. And despite the warm maternal wishes that Victoria expressed when he left the Isle of Wight, the story of Duleep Singh wasn’t going to end happily either.
When much of the Indian subcontinent rebelled just three years later, Victoria’s government expected Duleep Singh to condemn his countrymen. But instead there came from him only an ominous silence. She was forced to defend him, praising the ‘extreme gentleness’ he’d displayed when he’d played with her children.55 Unsuspected by the queen, though, Duleep during his visit to Osborne must have experienced something of the same resentment that lay behind the violence in India. As he grew up, Duleep gradually began to move towards the conclusion that he had – as he put it – ‘been cheated out of his kingdom, and out of his private estates’.56
In 1884 he returned to India, with the intention also of returning to the Sikh religion, but the British government would not allow him to stay. Before his lonely death, which took place in Paris in 1893, Duleep Singh was heard referring to Victoria, the present owner of his people’s diamond, as a receiver of stolen goods. His name for her was ‘Mrs Fagin’.57
15
Miss Nightingale at Balmoral, 21 September 1856
On 21 September 1856, James Clark was driving along the wooded banks of the River Dee towards Balmoral Castle. He was coming from the nearby valley of Glen Muick, where the queen had lent him a house. Clark’s route took him through an ancient forest alongside the river. On a sunny day, the Dee’s water runs as brown as tea, but this was a miserably wet autumn. ‘Crops much damaged,’ Dr Clark recorded in his journal, while the river, usually thigh-high, was five feet deep.1 It was twenty-one years since he had ‘saved’ the princess from typhoid in Ramsgate. Despite the unfortunate business of Flora Hastings, Clark was still, at sixty-seven, Victoria’s most trusted doctor.
He was accompanied on his journey to Balmoral by his house guest: a tall, angular, dark-eyed woman who was thirty-six years old. Despite being just one year younger than Victoria, now pregnant for the ninth time, Miss Florence Nightingale was childless and unmarried. She had ‘a good clear complexi
on, and pretty mouth and smile’, but did not set much store by looking handsome. Her strengths lay elsewhere. Reports had already reached the court that she was ‘very quiet and businesslike’ yet ‘wonderfully clever, full of information on all subjects, a good classical scholar, knowing Greek and Hebrew and those sort of things’.
She could have been cold and formidable, but Florence Nightingale had a knack of winning people over. Despite her ‘very quiet, rather stern manner’, people said, there was ‘an immense deal of fun about her’.2 Today she wore her customary black, and a ‘simple little cap, tied under her chin’. Her dark hair had been cut off because of her work, important work that she wanted to discuss with the queen. For she was an eyewitness to the recent mismanagement of the British forces out in Crimea, and her hair had been shorn ‘on account of the insects with which the poor men were covered in the Hospitals!’3 She was still frequently made nauseous by a mysterious Balkan disease that would plague her for years.
Florence knew Dr Clark well because four years earlier, in 1852, he’d treated her sister Parthenope for another incomprehensible and debilitating illness. Parthenope had at least partially recovered through rainy walks and the sparklingly clear air at Dr Clark’s quiet Deeside home. Today we might call Parthenope’s condition a nervous breakdown, but Dr Clark had thought her in danger of lunacy, exhibiting ‘a total absorption in self, with, at times, chronic delirium’.
According to her biographer Mark Bostridge, though, Florence believed differently: that her sister’s condition was all too common among many a well-off spinster, ‘condemned to spend her days in a meaningless round of trivial occupations, which ate away at her vital strength’.4 Parthenope’s illness, Florence thought, was simply caused by boredom, ‘by the conventional life of the present phase of civilisation, which fritters away all that is spiritual in women’.5 Watching Parthenope lose her sanity, her strength, even the ability to walk, had left Florence aghast. She observed that all around her women were going ‘mad for the want of something to do’.6 She was determined to avoid this fate for herself.
Her chance had come in 1853 when a dispute broke out between Russia and Turkey. The issue of whether Orthodox or westernised monks should control access to the holy places of Palestine became a trigger both for war and for enormous upheaval in Florence’s genteel upper-class life. Soon Russia had invaded Turkey, the French had taken Turkey’s side and Britain had followed France into the conflict. Britain and its rich, industrialised allies faced a vast, ill-equipped Russian army whose lack of transport forced its soldiers to walk to the field of conflict. The British were always going to win the Crimean War. But they did so with a surprising amount of pain and ineptitude. At peace for over forty years, the British army was sorely puzzled by the logistics of fighting in a theatre 3,000 miles away. Disease killed more men than enemy action, and the treatment of the British wounded was shockingly bad. Florence Nightingale began to experience a savage desire to do something to help, specifically to lead a team of nurses out to Crimea. Eventually ‘Flo’s’ friends and family accepted the inevitable, gave in and ‘allowed’ her to go to war.
The Crimean War was the making of the legend of Miss Nightingale, but it was almost the breaking of Victoria. ‘Lord John Russell may resign and Lord Aberdeen may resign,’ she complained, as the war took a turn for the worse, ‘I sometimes wish I could.’7 It was the most severe test she had yet faced as queen. She herself was deeply frustrated by her government’s cautious approach to intervention, which had, she believed, merely encouraged Russian bellicosity. Eventually it became clear that she had to appoint Lord Palmerston as premier, despite her personal dislike of him, as only he had the gumption to lead Britain out of the crisis.8
Yet this war, however mis-fought, would bring about a change for the better in the way Victoria ruled. It also illustrated the essential difference between her way of doing things and Albert’s. His contribution to the war effort lies in no fewer than fifty bound volumes of correspondence. Training his intellect upon the problem, he compiled detailed plans for drumming up a foreign force to help the British.9 His plans were rejected, and once they got out, he was pilloried in the press and even accused of treason. Victoria, on the other hand, brought her emotional intelligence to bear. As someone who felt, and suffered, and who could share other people’s pain, she revealed herself to be a gifted leader in a way that eluded Albert. It was a ‘relief’ to write letters of condolence to the parents of the fallen, she explained, as she now so often did, because it allowed her to express ‘all that she felt’.10 In the crisis of the war, through consoling, and rebuilding confidence, Victoria began to show what she might be capable of as a queen. By seeing off her soldiers, receiving the wounded, and publically praising and giving gifts to the troops, she emerged more popular than ever. She managed to make a nation feel that she cared.
This instinct that Victoria had, for entering into the minds of so many of her subjects, had such a subtle, everyday quality that many historians have overlooked it. One of Albert’s biographers thought that her diaries ‘make very revealing but somewhat depressing reading; there is an artless shallowness about them that reveals not only a selfishness … but a melancholy lack of imagination.’ ‘She was highly emotional and very impressionable,’ this historian concludes.11 Albert could also never be accused of being ‘highly emotional’ or ‘very impressionable’. But he could also never touch the hearts of the British people. It was a later Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, who claimed that if he heard Victoria’s views on any issue, he knew that he was hearing the opinion of the steady, respectable, upper-middle classes. ‘She was able to interpret and express the spirit and temper,’ wrote someone else who knew her, ‘of that class which, throughout her reign, was destined to hold the balance of political power in its hands.’12
But it took disaster for this special talent of Victoria’s to emerge. On 11 March 1854, she’d been afloat on the Solent to watch her great fleet sailing east. All too soon, ‘unsatisfactory accounts’ of her soldiers’ supplies, welfare and treatment began to arrive.13 In October, Victoria first heard of a plan to ‘send out 30 Nurses for the Hospitals at Scutari & Varna, under a Miss Nightingale, who is a remarkable person, having studied both Medicine & Surgery & having practised in Hospitals at Paris & in Germany’.14
‘We have now four miles of beds of not 18 inches apart,’ Miss Nightingale reported in November from the field hospital at Scutari, ‘the dysentery cases have died at the rate of one in two.’15 Florence’s letters home were widely circulated, fanning the flames of an increasingly sordid scandal of army negligence. Victoria was on the side of the nurses and men. ‘The Queen trusts,’ she wrote, to the rather useless Lord Raglan, that he would ‘be very strict in seeing that no unnecessary privations are incurred by any negligence of those whose duty it is to watch over their wants.’16
Victoria followed Miss Nightingale’s exploits closely. ‘I envy her,’ she admitted, ‘being able to do so much good & look after the noble brave heroes.’17 Searching for something that she could do herself, Victoria came up with the idea of the Victoria Cross for soldiers, a medal ‘For Valour’. As a personal thank you to Florence, she sent a feminine equivalent, a brooch with a red enamel cross, along with a warmly written letter full of concern for the well-being of Florence’s patients at Scutari. Victoria was slightly shocked to discover that Florence had copies of this letter ‘stuck up in every ward’. But Miss Nightingale explained that many of the soldiers ‘beg for a copy to keep as their greatest treasure, some saying, that they will learn it by heart, & some, how feeling they think it of the Queen to say what she has’.18 Victoria listened, and learned. She would explore this growing power of her pen.
For her part, Florence Nightingale knew all about the power of propaganda. A mistress of public relations, she jealously guarded her own image. Most Britons didn’t know what their national heroine looked like, for she refused to sit for a portrait, citing a dislike of being ‘made a show of’. As
a Victorian woman determined to play a part in public life, she had to be extra-careful to maintain her respectability, and this meant trying to stay out of the papers. The newspapers, though, were so keen to meet readers’ demands to see something of the celebrated Miss Nightingale that they just went ahead and published imaginary images instead. So rare were likenesses of Florence Nightingale that one completely fictional image even ended up being used in a textbook on physiognomy to demonstrate that she was the ‘pinnacle of British womanhood’. These made-up pictures in fact made ‘the Heroine of Scutari’, as the Weekly News named her, look extraordinarily similar to the queen.19
By 21 September 1856, the war was over, and Dr Clark had suggested that the two women might like to meet face-to-face. Miss Nightingale accepted his invitation because, as always, she could see a chance to promote the cause of medical reform. She sought advice on how best to influence the queen. The idea emerged that she should suggest a royal commission to investigate the army’s medical department. It was relatively easy to improve conditions in barracks and hospitals; harder to change the mentality of the institution that was ultimately responsible for providing such things – and here Victoria might be able to help.
Whatever Victoria might think, Miss Nightingale wasn’t coming to Balmoral just to be admired and thanked. She was here to do business.
The queen’s castle towards which Florence Nightingale and Dr Clark now drew near contained around seventy rooms, four bathrooms, fourteen water closets and a ballroom. Building work had been completed just twelve months previously. It was quite small for a royal residence, although its turrets, corners and oversized baronial tower made it look bigger than it was. The carriage halted at the porte cochère, where Florence stepped into a tiled entrance hall with antlers lining its walls. It led straight into a sitting room beyond. Balmoral was short of public rooms, because it wasn’t designed for large-scale entertaining. It had been created by an Aberdeen architect as a base for Albert to go shooting or stalking, and for Victoria to humour him. The marble coat of arms that surmounted the front door wasn’t hers; it was his.20