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

by Lucy Worsley

  Victoria had also grown increasingly squeamish. She’d once been notably at ease with bodies and biology and matters of the flesh. But she’d come to think of her daughter as a pure, perfect, untouched lily. She therefore experienced deep distress when she imagined Beatrice losing her virginity. ‘That thought – that agonizing thought,’ Victoria wrote, that ‘is to me the most torturing thought in the world.’29 The queen would not have been so concerned in her more robust youth. But this was nine babies later, and it also reflects how women were seen more widely in high Victorian culture.

  Yet Beatrice, perhaps realising that this was her only chance, persisted in her rebellious insistence that she would marry. By December, her mother’s silent disapproval could not be sustained. Beatrice could marry, Victoria conceded, but there was one condition. Prince Henry would have to give up his army career, and come to live with his mother-in-law. While Victoria would reluctantly allow the marriage, it was ‘quite out of the question’ that Beatrice should ever ‘have left the Queen’.30

  It was an unusual stipulation, but Prince Henry agreed. And once Victoria knew that he was ‘willing to come & live in my house’, she could resist no longer. It was at the very end of the year, on 29 December 1884, that she called Beatrice and her betrothed into Albert’s room at Osborne. There, in the presence of her dead husband’s spirit, Victoria gave them her blessing.31

  She might have reconciled herself to the thought that she was gaining a son rather than losing a daughter, but even so Victoria dreaded the couple having children. She was relieved to find that the courtship had included ‘no kissing, etc.’, which she believed that ‘Beatrice dislikes’. (One suspects that Beatrice may have failed to express her true opinion on the subject.) ‘The wedding day,’ Victoria groaned, ‘is like a great trial and I hope and pray there may be no results!’32

  This royal wedding, indeed any royal wedding, was bound to be good for the monarchy. To a constitutional commentator like Walter Bagehot, who observed the phenomenon at work, a royal family was simply much more palatable ‘to the common mind’ than a republic. ‘One person doing interesting actions,’ he thought, was a hundred times more attractive than scores of elected representatives, all doing the same boring things. He believed that women in particular ‘care fifty times more for a marriage than a ministry’.33 And Beatrice was a quietly popular figure in the press and with the public, who appreciated her selflessness. ‘Many daughters have acted virtuously, but thou excelleth them all,’ ran the inscription on a silver tea and coffee service among her wedding gifts.34

  To make it entirely clear that Beatrice would never leave Osborne, she was to be married there, and the first royal wedding to take place in a parish church was planned. It soon became clear that the pressure upon the Isle of Wight’s accommodation would be immense. Some guests were to stay on board the royal yachts. Forty-four witnesses would sign the register, in an order that Victoria had carefully worked out in advance, to avoid any demeaning squabbles about precedence.35

  After a good deal of confusion caused by Victoria’s customary detailed but unclear directions, it emerged that guests were to wear demi-toilette, which meant jewels and elbow-length sleeves.36 One guest noticeably absent from the list was the Prime Minister, William Gladstone, who was back in office after Disraeli’s death. Victoria had not been able to bring herself to invite the man she called a ‘half-mad firebrand’, even though it would have been politically expedient.37

  By late morning, in hot sun, Victoria and Beatrice were finally ready to leave by carriage for the short drive to the church of St Mildred’s in the nearby village of Whippingham. ‘The whole way crowds of people,’ Victoria noted with satisfaction.38 St Mildred’s was a ‘little ivy-clad village church’, and this was supposed to be ‘an ideally perfect village wedding’.39

  It was one o’clock, and the bride was late, by the time they arrived. Outside St Mildred’s stood a guard of honour of Highland soldiers and a band of ‘Pipes & drums’. Bertie was waiting at the gate, along with ‘the sweet young Bridesmaids’ wearing white dresses and white carnations.40 Ten in number, they were all Beatrice’s nieces. The radical MP Henry Labouchère thought they possessed a ‘decided absence of beauty’. He also considered that Bertie ‘seemed ill at ease and out of sorts’, while Victoria ‘looked exceedingly cross’.41

  Feeling the pressure of the occasion, Beatrice and her mother now moved along a red-carpeted covered way lined with people.42 The church interior was filled with ‘ivy and ferns’ and a ‘pyramid of flowers in pots’.43 The choristers from St George’s Chapel, Windsor, had been brought down for the occasion, but they were feeling miffed because no one had remembered to arrange for them to have any refreshments.44

  Waiting patiently at the altar was the stunningly handsome Prince Henry, in his brand-new blue sash of the Order of the Garter. Beneath it, at the queen’s own request, he was wearing his glittering white Prussian military uniform.45 The music was German too. Beatrice’s walk up the aisle, orange blossom in hand, was accompanied by Wagner, ‘beautifully played on the organ by Mr Parratt’.46

  Beatrice could only squint at her groom-to-be through the folds of the very same Devon lace veil her mother had worn when she’d married Albert. This was hugely significant. Victoria attached great importance to clothes, and a well-informed source tells us that ‘almost without exception, her wardrobe woman can produce the gown, bonnet, or mantle she wore on any particular occasion.’47 The veil was one of the most precious items in the Albertian reliquary. ‘I look upon it as a holy charm,’ Victoria wrote, ‘as it was under that veil our union was blessed forever.’48 Her loan of it to Beatrice was an important act of blessing.

  And the queen seemed to have relented. ‘A happier looking couple could seldom be seen kneeling at the altar together,’ she wrote. ‘Though I stood for the 9th time near a child … at the altar, I think I never felt more deeply than I did on this occasion.’49 Even so, those present noted her impatience with the Archbishop of Canterbury’s lengthy homily: ‘Her Majesty commenced to tap with her foot in a very ominous way.’50 Then the veil was lifted, and with it much of the tension, and Beatrice was married at last.

  Matthew Dennison reads the lending of the veil as the closing of a circle, as redemption.51 Yet I see it more as an action of control. Yes, Victoria had allowed Beatrice to marry. But only on her own terms.

  Back at Osborne, after the signing of the register, it was time for a sumptuous lunch. The wedding breakfast took place on the lawn in tents filled with ferns and flowers.52 Victoria’s meals were notoriously quick affairs, by now served in a succession of courses rather than from common serving plates: ‘when you finish one dish you get the next, without a pause for breath.’53 A visitor who often dined at Osborne in the 1880s recorded how dinner lasted exactly fifty minutes, ‘too much put on each plate by the servants’ and all the food ‘thoroughly British’.54

  This kind of large-scale, outdoor entertaining was something that grew more common as Victoria’s reign progressed. The late-night balls of her youth were giving way to the garden parties that survive as a fixture of national life to this day. When such parties were held at Buckingham Palace, Victoria would be driven slowly round the lawns in her landau before entering a ‘large black tent banked up with flowers; it was wide open – all the front – and her faithful subjects could see her taking tea and having her toast buttered by the Indian servant.’55 There’s even jerky surviving film footage of the elderly Victoria being handed, with great difficulty, out of her vehicle.

  At Beatrice’s wedding luncheon, the guests feasted to the accompaniment of ten bagpipers from a Highland regiment, who marched round the table ‘playing splendidly’.56 Victoria had a long-standing, highly inconvenient habit of listening to military music while eating. Once, the younger Ponsonby recalled, he had the job of reading some documents aloud to her during a dinner performance of Wagner by the Royal Marines band, bellowing so that she could hear. The other guests found it hilario
us when the music came to an unexpected stop, leaving Ponsonby ‘shouting’ into silence.57

  After the lunch, and a photograph, the mother-of-the-bride’s mask began to slip. At four, she went upstairs with Beatrice, who was to change into her going-away dress of cream crêpe de Chine. The awful moment of parting was approaching. Prince Henry was also summoned, and now Victoria broke down in tears. She took leave of ‘my darling “Baby” … I felt utterly miserable when they left my room, & had not the heart to go down & see them drive away.’ She would, in fact, see her daughter in just two days’ time, but even this short break seemed unendurable.

  After dinner that night, the guests spilled out into the sweet-smelling air of the gardens. The evening sky was bright with fireworks, and the yachts in the bay below ‘were lit up & sent off rockets’.58 The great fountain in the middle of the Osborne lawns was ‘hung with many-coloured lamps’ and while ‘the fireworks gleamed and paled, and died out in the darkness … the sounds of laughter made pleasant echoes in the night’.59

  Yet Victoria could not enjoy it. She felt old, and tired, and lonely. She circulated dutifully among the guests on the lawn, ‘& tried to speak to people’. But she was so weary, and ‘so low, that it was an effort, & I escaped quietly to my room. My dear child was never out of my mind.’60 Even on peaceful days it was usually one o’clock in the morning before Victoria nodded off.61 After a trying day like this one, perhaps it was even later before the lady-in-waiting appointed to read the queen to sleep found that her work was done.

  After Beatrice had driven triumphantly off with her gorgeous husband, through crowds and past massed bands, her first thought had been of the mother she’d left behind.62 Arriving at nearby Quarr Abbey for the night, Beatrice immediately sat down to write a letter to say that she’d arrived safely.63 She could then with a clear conscience try to enjoy her forty-eight-hour honeymoon.

  Beatrice regretted her mother’s histrionics. ‘When I took leave of her,’ she told a friend, Victoria had ‘got very upset, poor thing’. But Beatrice also now experienced, perhaps for the first time, the pleasure of having had her own way. ‘What rest & peace I feel,’ she admitted, ‘now that all is accomplished, my heart has so long desired’.64

  Beatrice would in due course give birth to four children, and her husband became a valued member of Victoria’s family circle. With his love of theatricals and singing, Prince Henry’s lively company meant that ‘several of the Queen’s lonely habits of life have gradually disappeared’.65 One of the rare photographs of Victoria smiling was taken at Osborne the year after the wedding, the queen’s podgy face a butter-ball of pleasure. In the picture Beatrice stands behind her, and Victoria has a granddaughter and a great-granddaughter at her side. Four generations, and her own grin, encouraged the queen to pronounce the sitting ‘very successful’.66

  But there is a sad coda to Beatrice’s story. Henry eventually got bored with jollying along his mother-in-law on the Isle of Wight, and finally won grudging permission to go to fight in Africa. He was observed to be ‘bursting with excitement’ at the prospect of being a soldier once again.67

  His mission was to destroy the Ashanti Kingdom and – purportedly – to end its traditions of slavery and human sacrifice. In reality, the expedition was part of the unseemly ‘Scramble’ for Africa that was taking place between the various European powers, who used gunboats and machine guns against native populations armed with muskets.68

  Yet the continent of Africa also had its own natural defences. Henry was travelling through modern-day Ghana when he succumbed to the malaria that attacked no fewer than half of the British forces. He died on board the ship bringing him home, and his corpse was preserved in rum in a makeshift coffin run up out of biscuit tins.69 He was laid to rest in St Mildred’s Church, where he’d been married just ten years before.

  Regardless of her initial reluctance to accept Prince Henry into her family, Victoria was inconsolable, mourning him as ‘a bright sunbeam in My Home’.70 And Beatrice, having loved, and lost, had no choice but to return to being her mother’s closest companion and assistant. She devoted her fifty-year widowhood to writing, copying, checking and labouring away as the queen’s most trusted and intimate secretary.

  Despite her valiant struggle, Beatrice failed, in the end, to escape.

  22

  Munshi-Mania: Excelsior Hotel Regina, French Riviera, 4 April 1897

  It was 4 April 1897, and Victoria was on holiday among the cicadas and the palm trees on the Côte d’Azur. She’d often visited Nice before, but this time she was trying out a spanking new hotel named in her honour as the Excelsior Hotel Regina. A new suite, its balconies overlooking the slow heave of the Mediterranean far below, had been completed specially just three weeks before her arrival. Victoria had observed the construction of this hotel – ‘the new enormous erection’, as she called it – during a stay the previous year in the Grand Hotel. The Grand was now completely overshadowed by the hulking Regina.1

  The 400-room Regina, which still stands today, is a belle-époque wedding cake of a building, loved and loathed in equal measure. One of Victoria’s courtiers called it ‘a monstrous stage decoration, with grotesque pinnacles and ugly, bloated, white-domed towers’.2 It is so large that it stands atop an entire street of shops. At the time its doors opened, it was the very pinnacle of luxury, with electric lighting throughout, ‘steam pipe heating’ and an omnibus service that could get you to Nice’s casino in fifteen minutes.3

  Victoria even had a private lift ‘with artistic ironwork’ to take her up to her first-floor rooms.4 She could now ‘only walk a few steps with the greatest difficulty, supported by an Indian attendant’.5 Her suite, all on one level, included a bedroom with rose silk hangings and a ‘yellow plush’ rug.6 Victoria’s rooms were furnished, as usual, with familiar pieces brought with her from Windsor, although the hotel management had somehow rustled up locally a portrait of George III for the queen’s dining room. It was worth their trouble, for Victoria’s household occupied no fewer than seventy rooms in the hotel’s entire western wing, at a cost of 80,000 francs for two months.7 She preferred staying in a big hotel rather than a private rented villa because even the biggest villa couldn’t accommodate her whole party.

  ‘I am a terribly modern person,’ Victoria had written in her journal at the age of seventeen. Regarding her holiday habits at least, this was still true.8 Today it takes less than two hours to fly from London to Nice, but in the year of Victoria’s birth the journey had involved sixteen days of continuous travel. With the coming of the railway to Cannes in 1863, the voyage was slashed to just forty-eight hours.9 Victoria’s household, like her still clad in mourning for Albert, would get off the train blinking and disorientated by the speed of the transition. ‘The weather is glorious,’ wrote woman-of-the-bedchamber Marie Mallet, ‘everyone in white dresses and flowery hats, I feel like a little black mole and a dowdy one too.’10

  Michael Nelson, historian of the French Riviera, points out that after Albert’s death Victoria made almost annual visits to the Mediterranean, spending 332 nights, or nearly a year of her life, on its sunny shores. Where their queen led, other Brits followed. A French innkeeper, upon being asked where his guests came from, got the reply that ‘they were all English, but he was not sure if they were Germans or Russians’.11 If they were tourists, they must come from England. Even today, the Hotel Westminster, Le Royal and Queenie’s Brasserie jostle each other for space on Nice’s Promenade des Anglais.

  And Victoria herself was enjoying something of an Indian summer beneath the long-trunked, cloudy-headed pines that looked so picturesque against a Mediterranean skyline. The pattern of her hotel days in Cimiez, an upmarket suburb on a hill behind Nice, was undemanding. She was dressed by the servants who were almost a second family. One of her wardrobe maids spent the night on call in the dressing room just next door to her bedroom.12 At half past seven, the maid on the next shift would come into Victoria’s bedroom to open the green silk blinds
and shutters. Her silver hairbrush, hot water, folded towels and sponges were all laid out by these wardrobe maids. Her pharmacist’s account book records the purchase of beauty products such as ‘lavender water’, ‘Mr Saunders’ Tooth Tincture’ and ‘cakes of soap for bath’.13

  Victoria’s clothes were handled by the dressers, who were better paid than the maids. Their duties, ran Victoria’s instructions, included ‘scrupulous tidiness and exactness in looking over everything that Her Majesty takes off … to think over well everything that is wanted or may be wanted’.14 Her black silk stockings with white soles had for decades been woven by one John Meakin, while Anne Birkin embroidered the garments with ‘VR’.15 Victoria grew fond of faithful servants like Anne, and even had Birkin’s portrait among her collection of photographs. Despite their sombre aspect, even her mourning gowns were finely made. She had settled into a series of very minor variations upon a square-necked bodice and skirt, customised with quirky little pockets for keys and seals, all cut pretty much the same to save her the trouble of fittings. On her head went a white cap, with streamers of lace, and round her neck a locket containing miniatures of two of her children: Alice, now lost to diphtheria, and Leopold, to haemophilia.16

  She ate her 9.30 breakfast in the garden beneath her open-sided green-fringed tent. She had two cups for her coffee, and her servants observed a habit of pouring the drink from one to the other until it was the right temperature.17 The menu included ‘rolls, eggs, fried fish, grilled bacon and Cambridge sausages’, and she would graze among the dishes, trying different things each day.18

  Meanwhile the wardrobe maids were cleaning her rooms. Among their duties was the task of putting away the journal in which Victoria had invariably completed an entry the night before.19 The maids used photographs, like those taken of Albert’s death-chamber, to guide them in putting the furniture and knick-knacks back in place.20