by Lucy Worsley
For his part, Davidson thought that Ponsonby lacked rectitude, and ‘would cleverly try to get her out of doing wrong things’ when ‘he might have done far more sometimes by a direct appeal’.74 The queen’s most trusted courtiers understood that she respected them for the occasional intransigence. ‘If I lacked all moral courage,’ wrote Marie Mallet, one of her particularly favoured women-of-the-bedchamber, ‘the Queen would be the first to despise me.’75
However, Ponsonby was right that it was genuinely hard to change Victoria’s mind. Once her household were discussing the possibility of her attending a social gathering at Buckingham Palace. ‘But H.M.,’ Ponsonby records, ‘in sad and mournful tones said to me she was damned if she would.’76 She didn’t confront people who disagreed with her; she just excluded them from her presence. Or she simply snubbed them, staring through them unseeingly, like a silent ghost, ‘pale and statue-like’.77 At state occasions in her sixties, Victoria appeared in a black dress, black velvet train, pearls and a small diamond crown. She was quite capable of looking ‘straight in front of her … not even the flicker of a smile on her face’. The effect, the lack of interaction, could be terrifying, ‘the very embodiment of majesty’.78
So if Victoria wouldn’t talk to Ponsonby about John Brown, he could not make her. And he’d previously experienced periods of icy silence in punishment for having said the wrong thing. She’d once put him firmly in his place after a row by sending Miss Norèle, the royal children’s French governess, to tell him that a government minister had resigned.79
But with Randall Davidson it was different. It became clear that Victoria could unburden herself to him with ease. Davidson’s predecessor as Dean had noticed that she did need someone to talk to. It was a basic human requirement. Her position had made her distrustful until she knew a person well, but then ‘there is no one with whom more is gained by getting her into the habit of intercourse with you’.80 In the gap between Deans before Davidson’s arrival at Windsor, wrote lady-in-waiting Horatia Stopford, ‘the Queen had literally no one whom she ever spoke’ to about personal matters. As well as befriending the queen, Davidson had quickly learned the ways of the wider castle, and built up valuable allies among the female staff. He knew, as one of the ladies-in-waiting put it, ‘everything from the shape of the kitchen-maids’ new caps to some of the deepest padlocks of my soul!’81
Eventually, on the evening of 6 March, after discussing the matter at length with Ponsonby, Davidson sat down in his Deanery to write Victoria a long, long letter. He had decided to go where Ponsonby feared to tread, and directly to address the issue of her John Brown book and advise her not to publish it. He wrote page after page, most of it fulsome gratitude and praise. The surviving draft contains crossings-out, insertions and revisions.82 But among the fulsomeness he threw in a few stingers. Davidson said that most of her subjects had enjoyed the confidences she’d shared with them from her Highland journals. But, he continued, there were some Britons, perhaps it would be true to say many Britons, ‘who do not show themselves worthy of these confidences, and whose spirit, judging by their published periodicals, is one of such unappreciative criticism as I should not desire your Majesty to see’.83 By this, Davidson probably meant the satirical pamphlet John Brown’s Legs. A copy of it remains filed right next to the draft of his letter of 6 March among his private papers at Lambeth Palace Library.84
Having finished his explosive letter, and having sent it up the hill into the Upper Ward, Davidson must have been anxious for an answer. But none came.
When she wanted to chastise a member of her household or family, Victoria had a habit of writing a letter, putting it in a box labelled ‘The Queen’ and ordering a footman to take it to the person in question. Her later Prime Ministers, like it or not, might expect to receive 200 letters and almost as many telegrams from the queen in a year.85 Albert had taught her that paper was the best way to wage a war of words. But the disadvantage of carrying out a quarrel by this means was that ‘it did not give the poor culprit much chance of a personal explanation’, words could be misinterpreted, and it all made for bad feeling.86
And on this occasion, Davidson’s letter caused such grave offence that he couldn’t even be told off by letter. The queen’s most trusted ladies-in-waiting were the unfortunate messengers often selected to convey their mistress’s rebukes. ‘We are,’ said one of them, ‘sheets of paper on which H.M. writes with words as less trouble than using her pen and we have to convey her words as a letter would do.’87 They had become accustomed to being her bearers of bad news. Jane Ely, one of the two ladies who lived all the time with Victoria, was the chosen favourite for ticklish tasks. Jane Ely would pass on royal reprimands in a ‘mysterious whisper’.88 Now she was deployed for the task of chastening Davidson. Jane Ely herself came down from the Victoria Tower to the Deanery to ask Davidson, verbally, to withdraw his words.
But Davidson refused to do so. He surprised everyone, and possibly even himself, by writing straight back to the queen, suggesting that he should resign.
It was a bold move in palace politics, and Davidson must have had an apprehensive time sitting it out, waiting to hear if his resignation would be accepted. Sunday morning came, and another preacher took his place in chapel. But no letter of acceptance ever arrived at the Deanery from the Victoria Tower.
Eventually, two whole days later, on 8 March, a gnomic missive at last arrived, in the hand of Horatia Stopford. ‘I have had a hard fight I assure you the last 48 hours,’ it read, ‘but I believe I have conquered, for which I thank God! I think you will be pleased at what I shall tell you.’89
The news, whatever it was, was conveyed verbally, but it seems that behind the closed doors of the queen’s suite, Davidson’s allies among her female staff had waged some kind of skirmish on his behalf against the John Brown memoir. It was as if the castle and court was a living organism. Almost like a snake digesting a swallowed mouse, there had to be a period for dissent to be processed before equilibrium could return. And Davidson ultimately triumphed. A whole fortnight passed until he again saw Victoria, but then nothing was said about his offer of resignation, and she was ‘more friendly to him than ever’.
Davidson had learned something very valuable: that Victoria ‘liked and trusted best those who incurred her wrath provided that she had reason to think their motives good’.90 He now shared the secret of John Brown’s own hold over the queen: not to be afraid.
After the tense stand-off of March 1884, the plan to publish the life of John Brown fizzled out. Ponsonby quietly disposed of Brown’s diary, and thus the story seemed to end.
But not quite. The Brown business went on causing trouble even after Victoria’s death. Bertie, as King Edward VII, had to deal with a case of attempted blackmail from a Balmoral connection who had come into the possession of some 300 letters from Victoria, which were said to be ‘most compromising’ on the subject of John Brown. Eventually, after negotiation, the letters were handed over and, it is believed, destroyed.91 Mary Ponsonby, meanwhile, went on writing articles for the press, and her children in due course published books that did much to illuminate the Windsor their parents both loved and loathed. And court myth tells that Ponsonby’s authentic nature was revealed in his final interview with the queen, which took place just before his stroke and eventual death in 1895. She is said to have rung the bell, and dismissed him, with the words, ‘Sir Henry you cannot be well.’
This had been in response to something that he’d said to her, his true views expressed at last. His words had been: ‘What a funny little old woman you are.’92
21
Baby Gets Married: Osborne House, 23 July 1885
‘The day splendid,’ wrote Victoria at Osborne House, ‘a very hot sun, but a pleasant air.’1 As usual she breakfasted outside beneath the trees. The sight of the breakfasting queen beneath her ‘large green-lined and green-fringed parasol’, a Scottish piper playing, was eccentrically magnificent.2 She’d eat a boiled egg from a golden
cup, and her empire was usually present in human form. ‘Two Indian Khitmagars in scarlet and gold remained motionless behind her chair,’ wrote one witness, while ‘a page and a Scotchman in a kilt waited till she rang.’3
This particular morning Beatrice was also present at the breakfast table with its view of the sea, and the meal was heavy with emotion. As it finished, Victoria handed her daughter a ruby ring of great sentimental value, a wedding present she’d been given forty-five years previously. Victoria ‘could hardly realise the event that was going to take place’.4 But this, at long last, was her youngest child’s own wedding day.
Victoria had long treated Beatrice as a human crutch. As a baby, Beatrice stood out among her stolid, Hanoverian-looking siblings. She’d been a beautiful infant, with blue eyes and a satin skin. ‘Quite the prettiest of us all,’ one of Beatrice’s sisters said, ‘she is like a little fairy.’5 ‘Such a delight to kiss and fondle,’ Victoria wrote upon Beatrice’s first birthday, regaining a bliss in babies she hadn’t experienced since her firstborn. ‘If only,’ Victoria added, Beatrice ‘could remain, just as she is.’6
The empty conventional words – ‘remain, just as she is’ – would have cruel significance as the beautiful baby grew up.
Beatrice was not only pretty but also precocious. Albert called her ‘the most amusing baby we have had’.7 At three, she had golden hair and high spirits, ‘a most amusing little dot, all the more so for being generally a little naughty’.8 She wanted to read a letter written by one of her mother’s ladies-in-waiting. ‘You can’t, it is French – you must learn,’ the lady said. Oh, but Beatrice already had: ‘I can say “bonne jour and wee”.’ When asked why she had not completed a chore, Beatrice always had a ready excuse: ‘I was very busy, too busy blowing soap bubbles.’9
But then this privileged childhood as her parents’ pet came to a sudden end. On the ghastly night of Albert’s death, there are persistent tales that Victoria took the baby Beatrice into her own bed, and wrapped her little body in the nightshirt of the man who had just died. ‘Though this story is most probably apocryphal,’ writes Princess Beatrice’s biographer, Matthew Dennison, it ‘stands as a metaphor’ for Victoria’s treatment of her youngest child and favourite daughter.10 After Albert’s death, Victoria diverted much of her love and her clinginess to Beatrice instead.
In the early years of Victoria’s widowhood, it was Beatrice, still not yet ten, who ‘mothered’ her mother. Beatrice ‘spends an hour with Her’ each morning, we’re told, ‘and is in agonies when She sees Her cry. “Dear Darling” as She calls Her, hugging and kissing her so tenderly.’11 The youngest daughter in any well-off Victorian family understood that she would be expected to remain at home, unmarried, to be her parents’ companion and carer. Beatrice was no exception. At six, she was asked if she would like to be a bridesmaid? ‘Oh, no, I don’t like weddings at all,’ she replied at once, ‘I shall never be married. I shall stay with mother.’12
When Beatrice was old enough to be launched upon the marriage market, Victoria avoided the subject. She forbade her household from even mentioning weddings in conversation if Beatrice was present. Isolated from her contemporaries, the ‘amusing little dot’ began to lose her self-confidence, and grow shy and withdrawn. Henry Ponsonby noticed Beatrice’s ‘want of interest, which I believe comes from fearing to care for anything the Queen hesitates about’. He suspected that her nervous, tongue-tied manner would never change unless ‘a good husband stirs her up’. But that was an unlikely prospect. ‘Poor girl,’ Ponsonby concluded, ‘what chance has she?’ Someone else who sat next to Beatrice at dinner reported that there was hardly any safe topic to talk about. ‘What with subjects tabooed, the subjects she knows nothing about, and the subjects she turns to the Queen upon, there is nothing left but the weather and silence.’13
Beatrice was also losing the blonde beauty of her babyhood. Victoria’s latest doctor, James Reid, naughtily referred to her in private as ‘Betrave’, a pun on the French word for beetroot.14 Matthew Dennison describes Beatrice in her late twenties as a ‘dumpy, despairing figure, too overwhelmed by boredom even to look up’.15 Albert had noted Victoria’s tendency to fret and sweat over small domestic matters. ‘Your fidgety nature,’ he’d complained, ‘makes you insist on entering, with feverish eagerness, into details about orders and wishes which, in the case of a Queen, are commands.’16 The adult Beatrice bore the brunt of this, acting as an unpaid maid whose life was micromanaged by her mother.
However, in 1884, a remarkable thing happened. Beatrice, who’d just turned twenty-seven, accompanied her mother to the quiet German town of Darmstadt. They were attending the marriage of one of Victoria’s many nieces to Prince Louis of Battenberg. Also present was the groom’s brother, Prince Henry.
Henry, often known as ‘Liko’, was the third son of Alexander of Battenberg. The Battenberg brothers were dashing young princes-about-Europe, multilingual, and martial in their interests. Their mother was only morganatically married to their father, which meant that Henry wasn’t properly royal. But this did not prevent him and Beatrice from secretly falling in love. During the Darmstadt trip, other wedding guests noted that Victoria ‘alarmed and tyrannized over her family’.17 And when she discovered what had been going on behind her back, she was horrified. ‘The dreadful engagement’, she called it. She felt the fact that her permission hadn’t been asked beforehand amounted to a grave deception.18
What was worse, Prince Henry was an army officer, serving in the royal household of Prussia. In the normal course of things, any wife would go to live with him in the Prussian royal palace of Potsdam.19 Victoria was adamant that there was to be no engagement, not least because Beatrice could never leave her mother.
On 23 July 1885, though, Victoria spent the morning resting in her Osborne bedroom while Beatrice used her dead father’s room nearby to get dressed for her long-awaited wedding. She had to be cruelly corseted to fit into her wasp-waisted white dress, with orange blossom at the bosom and all down its long lace skirt. ‘I came in,’ Victoria recorded in her journal, ‘whilst her veil & wreath were being fastened on. It was my dear wedding veil which I wore at all my Children’s christenings.’20
Beatrice must often have thought that this day would never come. She later told her eldest son that from May to November 1884, after she’d announced her intention to marry, her mother simply refused to speak to her. Any communication took place in the form of notes. Given Beatrice’s previous closeness to her mother, this seven-month estrangement must have been hard to bear.21
Beatrice’s exact statement, that her mother never addressed a word to her, must have been exaggerated by hindsight, for Victoria’s journal does record at least some conversation. On 8 July, for example, Victoria notes that ‘Beatrice came early to my bedroom to wish me goodbye’ before going on a visit.22 And yet, this particular page of the journal only survives at all in Beatrice’s own later transcript. It must have been tempting for Beatrice, as she decided what to copy and what to leave out, to massage the evidence here and elsewhere to minimise the record of her mother’s nastier behaviour. Perhaps she even did it unconsciously.
And it is undeniable that Beatrice’s name, which had previously peppered their pages, practically disappears from the queen’s letters. Exceptions are made only when Victoria writes, for example, ‘of the pain it has caused me that my darling Beatrice should wish … to marry’. ‘What agonies, what despair,’ she wrote, what ‘horror and dislike of the most violent kind’ she felt, ‘for the idea of my precious Baby’s marrying at all’.23
The problem lay not so much with Prince Henry; Victoria had a host of unrelated reasons for wanting her youngest daughter to remain single. As she told one of her sons-in-law, ‘mine is a nature which requires being loved, and I have lost almost all those who loved me most.’24 She felt she was owed company, attendance, attention from her children, and from an unmarried daughter most of all.
By this stage in her life, if Victoria was thwart
ed in anything, she would say that her health was at risk. Her physical fitness had become something of a smokescreen behind which she would hide. The queen ‘is roaring well and can do everything she likes and nothing she doesn’t’, wrote one perceptive courtier in 1869.25 The same year the historian Thomas Carlyle described her as ‘plump and almost young’, with a waddling walk; she ‘sailed out as if moving on skates, and bending her head towards us with a smile’.26 A less friendly German source from the Darmstadt wedding, though, described her as looking ‘like a cook’ with a ‘bluish-red face’. This gentleman believed the rumours that she was ‘more or less mentally deranged’.27
Yet it was indisputably the case that Victoria’s eyesight had begun to fail. And here the role of Beatrice, the person who read the queen’s correspondence aloud, was vital. Frederick Ponsonby, son of the magnificent Henry, joined his father in the royal household, and described the role of unofficial Private Secretary that Beatrice attempted – but ultimately failed – to fill. ‘The Queen is not even au courant with the ordinary topics of the present day,’ wrote the younger Ponsonby, ‘imagine B[eatrice] trying to explain … our policy in the East.’ He, or Arthur Bigge, would write long reports setting out what they thought the queen needed to know, ‘but they are often not read to HM as B[eatrice] is in a hurry to develop a photograph or wants to paint a flower’. As a result, ‘hideous mistakes’ sometimes occurred. The saddest aspect of the situation, according to young Ponsonby at least, was that it was only Victoria’s eyes that were wearing out. ‘Her memory is still wonderful, her shrewdness, her power of discrimination as strong as ever.’28