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

by Lucy Worsley

  16

  A Night with Nellie: 6 September 1861

  Five years later, at half past nine on the grey morning of 24 August 1861, Victoria was travelling south-west from Dublin by railway. She was going deeper into Ireland, towards a gigantic military camp. More than 10,000 of her soldiers spent each summer practising drill on the long flat plain called the Curragh. This year, they’d been joined by Victoria’s eldest son Bertie, Prince of Wales, who was now just short of twenty.

  The Curragh Plain was an ancient mustering ground for troops, which had been re-established as a military base in 1855 to train infantry destined for the Crimean War. The soldiers occupied hutments and tents sprawling along a ridge above a plain covered with furze, sheep and no fewer than forty-four prehistoric earthworks.1 The rich grassland of the Curragh Plain was also grazed by the horses that ran at its famous racecourse. It was ‘a splendid position’, Victoria thought, with ‘an immense amount of turf’.2 The turf still exists to this day despite the despoliations of the modern world, including a motorway. It is so intensely green in colour that it can only be described as emerald.

  The army that had eventually bumbled its way to victory for Victoria in the Crimean War included some 37,000 Irishmen, 40 per cent of its strength. Yet Victoria had markedly different feelings towards Ireland than to her beloved Scotland. Like so many members of the British establishment, she had a deep-rooted suspicion of the Catholic Church.3 The two countries of Britain and Ireland had been spliced together into a United Kingdom only sixty years previously, a defensive measure on Britain’s part to make its colony less vulnerable to insurrection and French invasion. In 1861 Victoria had twice as many Irish as Scottish subjects. But the Irish were easily able to deduce their lesser status from her movements. During Victoria’s reign as a whole she spent seven entire years in Scotland, but only five weeks, over four visits, across the Irish Sea.4 She would also impatiently refuse suggestions that Bertie should become her permanent viceroy and representative in Ireland to give the country’s problems some of the attention they so clearly required.5

  Whenever she did cross the Irish Sea, Ireland’s queen found the people and their suffering to be distressing. She made her first visit shortly after the Great Famine, the result of repeated failures of the potato harvest that had seen a million die and millions more emigrate. During this present trip of Victoria’s, a whole decade later, its effects could still be seen. Charles Kingsley, writing in 1860, found himself ‘haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw … if they were black, one would not feel it so much, but their skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as ours’.6 Victoria agreed, finding ‘more ragged and wretched people here than I ever saw anywhere else’.7 Like Kingsley, she found her Irish subjects to be not quite human: ‘the more one does for the Irish the more unruly and ungrateful they seem to be.’8

  Unengaged, absentee landlords who shared these views had exacerbated the problems of the famine, as had the very limited franchise for Irish voters. Despite Victoria’s having sent her own charitable contribution to crisis relief funds, many Irish people called her the ‘Famine Queen’ for the perceived harshness of her government and, by implication, of herself.9 A newspaper called the Dundalk Democrat pointed out that her personal donation had been matched by the Sultan of Turkey and exceeded by the American government.10

  Everyone knew there was a need for change, but no one could agree on how to bring it about. Victoria’s present visit took place three years after the Fenian Brotherhood had been founded in an uneasy Dublin.

  And yet, a visit in person by their queen could still bring out the Irish crowds. At Newbridge station, the camp’s nearest railhead, Albert and Affie were waiting with a carriage to pick up the female members of the family. Victoria had brought with her Bertie’s sisters Alice and Lenchen, as well as her lady-in-waiting Jane Churchill. One newspaper reported that 30,000 spectators had turned out, to see both the queen and the military manoeuvres that her army would perform upon the plain. They arrived in mail coaches, hotel omnibuses, ‘shabby-genteel turn-outs of squireen aristocracy’, and more than 100 packed railway trains. ‘Such a crowd & such a scamper & scramble,’ Victoria herself observed, ‘people in every direction, ladies, common people &c on foot, & horseback, jaunting cars.’11 The mood was mixed. The crowds received her with the ‘greatest curiosity’, one Republican newspaper said, but ‘with the most marked absence of enthusiasm’.12

  The royal family now drove across the turf to the camp. It by now consisted of ten squares of huts, each containing 1,000 soldiers. These hutments had been built at extraordinary speed at the height of the Crimean War. Each hut was constructed in a single day by a gang of men who slept in the finished construction that night before starting the next one in the morning. During the ‘drill season’ from April to September, even this vast number of huts got full up, and some soldiers had to sleep under canvas. It was a veritable city of huts and tents.

  The camp gave a strong first impression of order and clockwork military precision. Shooting up at the centre of the site was the ‘tall clock-tower’ with six cannons before it guarding the Union Jack. There were Catholic and Protestant chapels to right and left, each capable of holding 1,800 men at a time. The schools, the post office, the market: all were ‘marvels of neatness and efficiency’. And then, beyond the chapels, stretched the huts. From a distance, wrote a visiting Charles Dickens, they looked ‘like a long brown wall … you could not suppose that a small army lay quiet behind’.13

  A closer inspection of the huts would reveal that while they seemed neat enough from the outside, they were not altogether comfortable for the men who slept on straw mattresses within. Wind whistled through the fir planking of the walls, which had only been intended to be temporary, and Victoria’s infantry would have to wait until army reforms of the 1870s to get their bedsheets changed even once a month.14 Twelve infantrymen had to dry their faces on a single shared roller towel, which was only laundered once a week.15

  In twenty-first-century Ireland, the camp is still the training school for the Irish army, and squads of wheezing youths in black shell suits, both male and female, run back and forth at commands shouted in Irish. But in 1861 it was the British army that now emerged from its hut city to march for its queen. It was the soft and frequent rain that made the grasses of the Curragh grow almost garishly green, and Victoria’s visit fell on a typically wet morning with ‘most violent’ precipitation.16 ‘Two cooling showers,’ Victoria said, with her usual nonchalance in the face of bad weather, although she did make the concession of ordering the carriage to be closed.17 The troops marching past got drenched.

  But even the rain could not dampen the ardour of the display. This was one of the great occasions of camp life, and the army relished the chance to show what it could do. All the generals and staff officers came out on a day like this, and ‘the artillery thunders in the hollows, the infantry maintain a rain of rattling fire … a vast cloud of white smoke, lit up with rapid flashes from the cannon, rolls over the plain.’ When the smoke cleared, and the cavalry had been and gone, you could still ‘hear their thunder in a distant hollow, or you see one line of steeds and men sweeping, like a wave, above the hills’.18

  Victoria was growing well used to the thunder crashes of the heavy guns. She had attended reviews of her troops increasingly often as they came shipping back from Crimea. For the purpose, she often wore the superbly tailored outdoor wear that suited her much better than frou-frou evening gowns. Her self-adopted ‘uniform’ was a scarlet, made-to-measure military-style jacket combined with the skirt of a riding habit. Albert had a matching outfit too, its chest padded out to simulate the muscles that his sedentary lifestyle had failed to give him.

  Today, though, as she was travelling by carriage, Victoria wore a dark cloak over her now-customary daywear of the crinolined skirt. She’d held out until the end of the 1850s before adopting this novel steel structure to puff out the skirt, which was widely thought to be an ‘
indelicate, expensive, hideous and dangerous article’.19 A crinoline, or ‘cage’, could swing the skirts out so unexpectedly that they caught fire, or got stuck in carriage wheels. But the stylish Empress Eugénie, whom Victoria much admired, is said to have popularised the crinoline during an 1855 visit to England. ‘Carter’s Crinoline Saloon’ opened soon afterwards, offering London ladies not only the crinoline but also the new ‘elastic stays … as worn by the Empress of the French’.20 Victoria nevertheless resisted the fashion until a heatwave three years later made her feel that her customary stiff muslin petticoats were ‘unbearable’. ‘Imagine!’ she wrote, to her married daughter in Germany, ‘since 6 weeks I wear a “Cage”!!! What do you say?’21 Having realised how convenient it was, she now only took her crinoline off to go sailing. There cannot have been much room in Victoria’s vehicle today, packed as it was with crinolined princesses.

  Meanwhile, outside the carriage windows, the rain and the military manoeuvres continued until at last came the moment that Bertie’s mother and sisters had been waiting for: the arrival within sight of the unit being commanded today by the Prince of Wales. Victoria, experiencing an unusual glow of maternal pride, reported that he ‘did not look at all so very small’.22 It was, as customary with her, a backhanded compliment. She constantly worried about her son’s disappointing physical appearance. ‘Handsome I cannot think him,’ she wrote, ‘with that painfully small and narrow head, those immense features and total want of chin.’23

  And Bertie’s achievements on the plain were disappointing too. The plan had been that he would march a whole battalion of 800 men past his admiring family, but his skill in drill had been found wanting. Although he was wearing the uniform of a colonel, he’d been given charge of just a single company, of around 100 soldiers.

  Once the last soldier had passed by, the family retired for lunch to Bertie’s own ‘Hut’, which in fact belonged to the general with whom he was staying. This was quite an improvement upon the huts of the common soldiers. There were guards outside it, and two tents erected to give extra space. Bertie himself had a ‘nice little bedroom’ as well as reception rooms and even a ‘good sized Dinning room’.24 In one of those acts of royal patronage intended to support local industry, the furniture was entirely of Irish manufacture.25 His sisters now had the chance to admire Bertie’s quarters, and his martial air. They found him changed, ‘a little browner, and certainly more robust and formed in figure’ than when he’d left for the camp in June.26

  And drill wasn’t the only new skill that Bertie had been learning in the huts of the Curragh camp.

  As Victoria’s children grew up, they all understood that they came second best to Albert. When they were young, it was Albert who was the more ‘modern’ parent at Windsor, who made more of an effort to be ‘friends’ with the children and who understood that the children were being damaged by their mother’s clear preference for him over them.

  ‘It is indeed a pity that you find no consolation in the company of your children,’ he once wrote to Victoria, at his most pompous and cruel. ‘The root of the trouble lies in the mistaken notion that, the function of a mother is to be always correcting, scolding, ordering them about and organising their activities. It is not possible to be on happy friendly terms with people you have just been scolding.’27 From the days when her dolls had blindly obeyed her commands, Victoria had been taught that other people would do as she wished in matters both large and small. She extended this habit of command over her children. The downside was a constant sense of strain. ‘The Queen really is insane about the maintenance of her maternal authority (tyranny would be a more correct expression),’ people said.28 Yet it must have been difficult to judge. If even normal parents worry constantly about being too lax or too strict, how much harder for a queen to get it right.

  It was an almost impossible task. And Bertie suffered from the circumstances of his upbringing perhaps even more than his eight siblings. He was not an academic child, but Albert nevertheless decreed that Bertie should study for seven hours a day, seven days a week. It was light work compared with the programme of nine hours of daily study that Albert had drawn up for himself at fourteen.29 A letter from Victoria to Uncle Leopold reveals Bertie’s greatest – indeed his insuperable – challenge in life: to be as good as his father. ‘I wonder very much whom our little boy will be like,’ Victoria wrote, ‘how fervent are my prayers … to see him resemble his father in every respect, both in body and mind.’30 While Bertie’s elder sister Vicky could almost live up to Albert’s rigorous standards, Bertie could not. At ten, it emerged that Bertie was under the impression that clever Vicky, not he, would inherit the throne.31

  Eventually, realising he could never live up to expectations, Bertie gave up trying. His mother complained about his ‘systematic idleness, laziness – disregard of everything’ which was ‘enough to break one’s heart’. With one of those failures of imagination that seem to be her most lamentable feature as a mother, she did not try to put herself in Bertie’s position, but contented herself instead with being indignant at his inadequacies.32 Bertie did have a streak of creativity, and was genuinely interested – for example – in fashion. But this was not considered acceptable. When Bertie went out shooting, Albert thought that his son paid regrettably little attention to the sport, and was ‘more occupied with his trousers’.33 All in all, Victoria feared that her son would never be ‘fit for his position’.34

  In the year prior to coming to the Curragh, Bertie had sampled university life. The dean of his Oxford college found him good company, ‘the nicest fellow possible, so simple, naïve, ingenuous and modest’, but he wasn’t allowed to stay long.35 Earlier in 1861, he’d arrived as a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, although he lived in a country house outside the town with his governor, General Bruce. Bertie studied history, and decided – with some irony, given the high-society friends he was starting to gather – that ‘the causes of the French Revolution were the luxury and profligacy of the noblesse’.36

  His mother failed to approve of the raffish friends that Bertie collected at university. The present-day aristocracy, she complained, ‘are so frivolous, pleasure-seeking, heartless, selfish, immoral and gambling’ that it made her too think of the guillotine.37 Mother and son, alike in many ways, constantly failed to understand each other. When Bertie’s grandmother Victoire died three months before the camp started, a devastated Victoria reproached him for his lack of feeling. ‘I did not like to intrude myself,’ he wrote back, in a sad little letter, ‘because I thought I should be in your way … I have ordered some more paper with rather deeper black edges as you wished.’38

  Bertie had long wanted a taste of military life, but it took some agitation before he was eventually given permission to go to the Curragh camp for ten weeks during his summer vacation. There he would learn how to handle the Enfield Pattern rifle-musket recently introduced into the British army, capable of stopping a galloping horse dead in its tracks.39 And he was also supposed to learn how to drill infantrymen, shouting the commands to transform columns into a wide line for an attack, or into a closed, defensive square. Provided the men kept their nerve, the square formation was virtually proof against even a cavalry charge.

  Bertie was attached to a battalion of the Grenadier Guards for his ‘drill season’. His commanding officers hoped that through ‘attendance at a daily parade’ he would be able to gain a grade each fortnight, climbing through the ranks from ensign to the point of being able to manoeuvre a whole brigade by the time he left.40

  When he arrived at the Curragh, journalists noted, Bertie ‘seemed extremely pleased with the place, and looked around him with evident satisfaction’.41 His instructor thought that ‘certain guarantees for decorum’ lay in the presence of Bertie’s host, Colonel Percy, and ‘the excellent tone among the Officers generally’.42 In theory, Bertie was to be treated just like every other junior officer, and one day he too arose at half past three to join his colleagues in an eighteen-mile
route march.43 Albert had arranged that his son and heir should be strictly supervised in the evenings. Bertie was to invite his fellow officers to dinner parties twice a week, dine twice a week in the mess of his regiment, and visit other regiments once a week as well. The other two evenings he was to spend quietly by himself, reading.44 It didn’t quite work out like this.

  Bertie’s presence in the camp did not, of course, go unnoticed. A journalist wrote in July that his quarters could ‘be seen by anyone passing on the road’. Passers-by could watch as Bertie ‘goes through the routine of military duties every morning with as much exactness as any other officer in the camp’. And after that, everyone could also see that he didn’t have much else to do. After lunch, he played ‘games of racket’, or else cricket, but there were still the long country evenings to get through.45 A lack of entertainment might still be a problem for the occupants of Curragh camp today, to judge by the bins throughout the camp crammed with empty bottles once containing vodka.

  And as the weeks went by, Bertie failed to make the progress expected. General Bruce reported that the goal had been overambitious, and that there was no chance the prince would be able to command a battalion by the end of August. ‘You are too imperfect in your drill,’ Colonel Percy told Bertie, ‘your word of command is not sufficiently loud and distinct.’ Colonel Percy declined to try to make anyone ‘think you more advanced than you are’.46

  Whatever Victoria may have thought privately about Bertie’s lack of progress towards his target, she thanked Colonel Percy in public for ‘treating Bertie as he did, just as any other officer’.47 Albert, on the other hand, was openly dissatisfied, and complained about the ‘idle tendencies of English youth’.48

  After their lunch in Bertie’s hut on the day of the manoeuvres, his family went off back to Dublin again, leaving behind just Affie, who was to spend the night in the camp as a treat. By the end of the week, Victoria and Albert were en route, by yacht, for Scotland and Balmoral. There is no record of how Bertie felt after his disappointing drill performance, but his fellow officers in the Grenadier Guards were only too keen to help him deal with any lingering sense of inadequacy. There were other ways in which he could be made to feel more manly.