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

by Lucy Worsley

  It was, in fact, Victoria’s very ordinariness that was extraordinary. Her lack of ‘stately or splendid appearance’ constituted its own sort of charm, ‘because of the very way in which it took people by surprise’.38 ‘A Queen in a bonnet cuts a very different figure from a commoner so dressed,’ writes historian Margaret Homans; ‘in Victoria’s case, the crown is visible by its absence.’39 That an empress should wear a bonnet does make complete sense if you remember that the Victorians liked to see domesticity as the highest achievement of their age. With this kindly-looking empress/grandmother at its head, Adrienne Munich argues, then surely the empire itself must be just ‘one happy family’? With its troops as obedient children? It was a pleasing construct, even if it was not one that could last much longer.

  Victoria may have succeeded at least in part simply because she looked no more threatening than your own loving grandmother. But, in a passive way, she did change things for other women too. After experiencing decades of female rule, no one, wrote the journalist W. T. Stead, ‘could honestly repeat the old rubbish about the natural incapacity of woman’. He thought that Victoria’s silent example, simply sitting there in her landau being looked at, had ushered in an age when it was normal to see ‘Woman’ as well as ‘Man … in the playing-field and the park, on the cycle and the street, on the platform, in business, in hospital and at the university’.40

  And Victoria brought other women with her into the public eye. Sitting opposite her, their backs to the horses, were her daughter Lenchen and daughter-in-law Alix. Vicky had been sent ahead in her own carriage, for royal etiquette suggested that the Empress of Germany must, like the Empress of India, travel facing forward.

  Alix was doing what she did best, which was ‘looking very pretty in lilac’.41 Her dress, immensely narrow, and as always immensely chic, had leg-of-mutton sleeves and her usual high collar. Alix’s necklines, originally serving the purpose of covering up a scar, had created a widely adopted fashion.

  Unfortunately, the rapprochement between Alix and Bertie after his illness had not lasted. He’d become captivated in 1891 by ‘The Babbling Brooke’, a nickname given to the loquacious and indiscreet Daisy, Lady Brooke, who would end up as Countess of Warwick. Bertie was embroiled in a notorious altercation with one of Daisy’s previous lovers, Lord Charles Beresford. There were rumours that Lord Charles had actually thrown a punch at the Prince of Wales.42 Alix had retaliated by taking a long holiday in her native Denmark, missing her husband’s fifty-fifth birthday. ‘I was so angry about Lady Warwick,’ she explained. Giving up on her marriage, she told her husband ‘once and for all that he might have any woman he wished’.43

  Bertie himself was riding elsewhere in the procession. His main challenge in life was boredom. He consoled himself for a certain lack of purpose with cigars, his numerous women and enormous meals (his waist now measured forty-eight inches, and his friends called him ‘Tum-Tum’). His mother still lacked confidence in him, and excluded him from many matters of business. She was unable, or at least unwilling, to see that he had a flair for public relations and image management. It was something that they had in common, and which Albert had lacked. If allowed to, Bertie could do a perfectly good job of running a court. ‘He never missed saying a word to the humblest visitor, attendant or obscure official,’ said one witness. ‘He would enter a room and, with the skill of an accomplished billiard player, look forward several strokes ahead, so that no one was left out.’44 He had a real gift for ‘setting others at ease’.45 Along with his social grace, and the sense of style he’d always manifested through his clothes, Bertie could also see that events like today’s would blossom into a whole new branch of monarchical business. Well-rehearsed, well-funded royal pageantry, a sort of performance art in its own right, would become fundamental to the monarchy in the next century.

  Bertie had chaired the organising committee for his mother’s Diamond Jubilee procession, but the loudest cheering today was reserved for her.46 It was, she reported, ‘quite deafening, & every face seemed to be filled with real joy. I was much moved & gratified.’ As her landau inched down the Strand, she encountered the Lord Mayor of London on a runaway horse, and passed a house into which were packed the ‘survivors of the Charge of Balaclava’.47 Her only regret was not being able to view the procession as a whole: ‘I had a very bad place and saw nothing.’48

  Towards St Paul’s, ‘the crowds broke out into singing God save the Queen.’49 Fifteen thousand people, including a choir of 500, had crammed themselves into the square before the cathedral. As Victoria approached, ran a breathless account in the Daily Mail, ‘the roar surged up the street’. When her carriage reached ‘the very steps of the Cathedral; cheers broke into screams and enthusiasm swelled to delirium … and there … and there … so very quiet, so very grave, so very punctual, so unmistakeably and every inch a lady and a Queen’.50

  Now a special service took place, right there in the street in front of the church, to avoid the need for Victoria to go through the lengthy and undignified process of getting out of her carriage. It was a neat solution to the problem of her immobility, and indeed every aspect of the day had been carefully considered. Even the question of whether the horses might defecate during the more spiritual parts of the service had been discussed.51

  Then it was time to start moving again, crossing London Bridge and going south, ‘along the Borough Road’. Victoria noted that even though there was a ‘very poor population’ down here on the other side of the river, they were ‘just as enthusiastic & orderly as elsewhere … festoons of flowers, on either side of the street’.52

  To route the procession through the poorer quarters of south London like this was unprecedented. As long ago as 1843, the radical papers had been calling for her to ‘put down the glass of the Royal carriage when passing the Town Common-side’ to ‘judge the real condition’ of her subjects.53 Victoria had indeed travelled more, seen more, than previous monarchs, but despite this, there was no question that she was anything other than a deep social conservative. She didn’t even see the point of educating people ‘for themselves’. ‘To be labourers and house-servants,’ she thought, ‘was as good and necessary as being clerks.’54 So it was with a grateful eye for their loyalty, but with no real eye to bettering their condition, that she passed through the Borough.

  It would be different in her children’s generation. Even while the procession unspooled, halls and community centres throughout the city were being set up to give a ‘Jubilee Feast’ for 400,000 London paupers. Alix, acting in the role of the bountiful princess, had set up a charitable fund to pay for their dinners. This was a precursor of the way that the philanthropy of Victoria’s grandchildren would come to define the monarchy in a way that Victoria’s own charitable giving had not.55 The idea for the feast, part of a wider conception that the monarchy should ‘do good’, had remained a vague royal dream until made real by the Scottish grocer Thomas Lipton. Famous for both his yellow-labelled tea and his grasp of logistics, he’d calculated that 700 tons of food and 10,000 waiters were required, and coughed up £25,000 to pay for it all.56 The newly rich, so long as they were as generous as Lipton, would consequently become welcome at Bertie and Alix’s court in a way they weren’t at Victoria’s.57

  Philanthropy on a smaller scale was also taking place as Victoria got to the bottom of the Borough. St George’s Church at the final twist of the High Street had rented out its roof to spectators, raising enough money to pay for the new ceiling inside, which survives to this day. The church was also the station of one of the forty camera operators from twenty different commercial firms who’d positioned themselves along the route.58 When Victoria was later shown some of their footage, she described it as ‘very wonderful’ if ‘a little hazy & rather too rapid’.59 These films nevertheless proved wildly popular over the following days in variety programmes in provincial theatres.60 The research of film historian Luke McKernan has revealed that the cameraman sited at St George’s was R. J. Appleto
n of Bradford. Later that afternoon, Mr Appleton rushed back to Bradford by train, developing his film en route. That very same evening he showed it on an outdoor screen erected by the local newspaper. As he’d caught Victoria in the act of smiling, it’s particularly sad that Appleton’s film doesn’t survive. But the story shows how technology now allowed many thousands more people who hadn’t even been physically present to join in the day.61

  At last it was time to head back towards Buckingham Palace, everyone by now rather desperate to get out of the sun. One senior courtier riding alongside Victoria ‘fainted, & had a bad fall’, and she herself admitted that ‘the heat during the last hour was very great’.62 She had a quiet lunch of lamb cutlets with Vicky and Beatrice, then rested before tea in the garden.63 There is a charming, humanising description, of how she would ‘carefully remove her gloves, untie her bonnet strings, and fling them over her shoulders’, preparatory to drinking her cup.64 She spent the afternoon gathering herself for a big dinner that night, and changing into ‘a black & silver dress’.65

  The grand dinner, including ‘bernoise à l’imperatrice’, or ‘chicken soup of the Empress’, was served upon plate worth a million pounds specially brought up from Windsor Castle in a large, discreet, dark-coloured wagon.66 The 108 diners in the Buckingham Palace ballroom (250 further household members ate in the Garden Pavilion) included numerous children and grandchildren.67 Victoria was well on the way to becoming, as she would be at the end of her life, foremother of nine children, thirty-six grandchildren and thirty-seven great-grandchildren.68 The grandson who was missing, Kaiser Willy, found his exclusion ‘deeply mortifying’.69 Although Victoria disliked him in principle, his skilful flattery usually won her round when they met in person. This evening, though, she did not miss him. She ‘tried to speak to most of the Princes & Princesses’ but ‘felt very tired’ and went to bed early at eleven.70

  Five days later at Osborne, Victoria had an official Jubilee photograph taken, wearing her Jubilee dress and, of course, her wedding lace.71 The whole royal family was becoming familiar with manipulating its photographic image. In 1863, The Times reported that Vicky and Alice had themselves retouched their brother Bertie’s wedding photos.72 (The princesses really preferred sitting to an old-fashioned artist, like a sculptor, who excelled in ‘making them look like ladies, while the Photographs are common indeed’.73) After each new photographic sitting, Victoria ‘carefully criticised’ the results.74 In her later photographs, like this Diamond Jubilee portrait, she was heavily retouched, a double chin removed, inches shaved off her waist. The Photographic News criticised a photo from her Golden Jubilee for making her look as if she had ‘oedematous disease’, a condition where the body bloats up with excess fluid. Her skin had been smoothed to the extent that she looked like a waxwork.75

  This, for a queen, wasn’t vanity, but part of her job. Uncle Leopold in her youth had conceptualised monarchy as a craft, almost as a trade: to remain in business, you had to work at it. Victoria did not make many public appearances, but photographs were doing that on her behalf, so she took them seriously. She was, in her mind, the hard-working head of a hard-working, entrepreneurial empire.76

  The Jubilee showed that her subjects generally agreed. Victoria was exhausted, but satisfied by her day. Of course, not everyone had been pleased to see her. Letitia Whitty, six years old, refused to wave ‘at that ugly woman’, and another unwelcome comment came from ‘a ribald voice in the crowd which shouted, “Ullo! ’Ere comes the Queen’s cook!”’77 But Victoria felt she’d lived through ‘a never to be forgotten day. No one ever I believe, has met with such an ovation as was given to me, passing through those 6 miles of streets.’78

  She was probably right. The admiration, the affection, were for the person as much as the office, for someone who’d become the nation’s grandmother, and a focus for the feeling that Britain was somehow better than other countries.

  And yet the Diamond Jubilee would linger on in many people’s minds as both the apogee of her reign, and the beginning of its end. ‘Scarlet and gold, azure and gold, purple and gold, emerald and gold … always blinding gold,’ wrote one witness of the procession, but ‘it was enough. No eye could bear more gorgeousness.’79 There was a sense of surfeit, that the empire was a fine thing but a costly one, threatened on all sides not just by qualms about its moral mission, but also by Britain’s rivals on the world stage. William Gladstone had predicted as long ago as 1878 that America would inevitably become ‘what we are now, the head servant in the great household of the World, the employer of all employed’.80 This growing sense of the ephemerality of power is perhaps the underlying but overwhelming feeling from the Diamond Jubilee. It was most powerfully expressed in a poem that Rudyard Kipling had published in The Times that morning.

  Far called, our navies melt away;

  On dune and headland sinks the fire:

  Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

  Is one with Nineveh and Tyre.

  Victoria was not the only person to suspect that her Diamond Jubilee, for all its colourful triumph, had been, as she put it herself, her ‘swan-song’.

  24

  Deathbed: Osborne, 22 January 1901

  As the New Year of 1901 began, Victoria still slept with Albert. On his side of the bed hung a memorial wreath of china flowers, surmounting a photograph of Albert’s corpse. Wherever his widow had travelled, these two items came along as well.1 But now, at eighty-one, Victoria was too frail to leave the Isle of Wight. In fact, she could hardly leave her bedroom at Osborne House.

  The last twelve months had been hard. In July 1900, her son Affie died after an unhappy marriage, the suicide of his own son and years of smoking and drinking. In October her favourite grandson, Lenchen’s son Christian Victor, followed Beatrice’s husband Henry in dying of malaria in Africa. The two blows almost crushed Victoria. One of her ladies, Marie Mallet, described how the queen’s majesty was ebbing away. When she ‘lets me stroke her dear hand’, Marie wrote, ‘I quite forget she is far above me and only realise she is a sorrowing woman who clings to human sympathy.’2

  ‘The greatest change had taken place,’ wrote someone who was shocked to find her losing weight as well as spirits; she ‘had lost much flesh and had shrunk so as to appear about one half the person she had been.’3 Victoria now had the smallest appetite of her lifetime, eating just ‘a tiny slice of boiled chicken’ or ‘a cut from the sirloin, which is sent from London every day’.4 As many older people do, she had grown shorter, losing three inches from her adult height. Her surviving dresses from this late period reveal adaptations to accommodate an osteoarthritic hump to the upper back. Dr Reid did not know it, for Victoria had never confided it to him, but she was still suffering from that ventral hernia, or painful stomach.5

  Victoria found it hard, in old age, to remain engaged with the more distant branches of her enormous family. She was simply losing track. When grandchildren ‘come at the rate of three a year’, she admitted, ‘it becomes a cause of mere anxiety … and of no great interest’.6 Her grandchildren could themselves detect her lack of enthusiasm. ‘I well remember Grandmama’s shocked yet amused little exclamations of horror when it was reported that one or the other of us had not been good,’ wrote one of them. ‘I have a sort of feeling that Grandmama as well as ourselves was secretly relieved when the audience was over.’7 But her daughters were as firmly captive as ever. ‘Had a fair night,’ Victoria wrote, on 13 January 1901:

  … but was a little wakeful. Got up earlier & had some milk. — Lenchen came & read some papers. — Out before 1, in the garden chair, Lenchen & Beatrice going with me. — Rested a little, had some food, & took a short drive with Lenchen & Beatrice. — Rested when I came in & at 5.30, went down to the Drawingroom, where a short service was held, by Mr Clement Smith, who performed it so well, & it was a great comfort to me. — Rested again afterwards, then did some signing & dictated to Lenchen.8

  This was the very last entry in the journal that Victoria had
kept for so many years. The next day she simply … did not write.

  Those close to her could see that she was in a steep decline, with no specific cause, just old age. Yet the news of her condition was not allowed to pass beyond the estate walls of Osborne. This was partly the wish of Bertie. Unwilling, or perhaps unable, to confront reality, he chose to believe that his mother was perfectly well, and his wishes had to be respected. But even while ‘all the news published from her court was calculated to cheer her people’, the best-informed London gossip had it that ‘a heavy cloud was darkening the sky – the Queen was failing’.9

  Three days after that last journal entry, on 16 January 1901, Dr Reid had a novel experience. He’d seen Victoria often, sometimes four times a day, for the last twenty years of his service as her doctor. But this was the first occasion, he recorded, that he’d ‘ever seen the Queen in bed’. ‘She was lying on her right side,’ he observed, ‘all huddled up and I was struck by how small she appeared.’10 For decades, she’d been very particular about her privacy, and not even her own children were allowed to see her unwell.

  The room in which she lay, vulnerable at last to other eyes than those of her trusted dressers, was the one in Osborne’s private pavilion designed all those years ago by Albert. Since 1893, Victoria had been able to ascend to her bedroom in a new lift. The room had salmon pink walls, and on its mantelpiece was the small ivory thermometer that helped her servants keep the temperature steady.11 The lavatory, bath and shower hidden behind the door-disguised-as-a-wardrobe had been luxurious, up-to-date fittings when they were installed in the 1850s. It was a sign of the prosperity that Britain had experienced in the latter half of her reign that these were things you could now find in many well-off households.