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

by Lucy Worsley

  Despite her wishes, it was going to prove difficult to keep Victoria’s privacy intact. Although neither she nor Bertie wanted anyone to know of her decline, Dr Reid in fact had a private arrangement with her eldest grandson, Kaiser Willy. Willy was anxious – rightly – that his English relatives would try to stop him from being called to his grandmother’s deathbed. It wasn’t just that they disliked him, although that came into it; it was also a matter of international politics. Everyone sensed that Willy saw himself and the German nation as successors to his grandmother’s leading role in Europe. Willy wanted some of her glamour to rub off on him. Bertie’s sisters, whatever private opinions they may have held on the capabilities of their brother as a future king, knew that this was not in the best interests of Britain.

  And yet, there was no denying that Willy was the queen’s eldest grandson, and Dr Reid, at least, thought he had the right to be kept informed. ‘Disquieting symptoms,’ Reid telegraphed to Berlin from Cowes, on Friday 18 January, ‘this is private.’12 In fact, historian Tony Rennell has revealed that the German envoy in London had already picked up the gossip at a club in Pall Mall, telegraphing the previous day to warn his kaiser. On Saturday 19 January, the news could no longer be contained, and the queen’s ill health was on the front page of the Daily Express.13 On Sunday, prayers were said for her at St Paul’s.

  That same day, 20 January, a screen was brought into Victoria’s bedroom at Osborne so that workmen could wheel in a small bed without seeing her or being seen. Once the little bed was prepared, she was rolled into it from the big double she’d shared with Albert, abandoning the marital bed at last.14 As in Albert’s final days, the scene was being set for a deathbed gathering. The cast were assembling too, jostling for a ringside seat at the moment of succession. Also on the Sunday, Willy commandeered a mailboat to bring him across from Flushing to Sheerness. He persevered in coming to Britain in the face of telegrams from his aunts at Osborne asking him to stay away. Bertie felt compelled to go and meet Willy’s train when it arrived in London. ‘I hope urgently the royal family will not get on the wrong side of the Kaiser with their usual lack of consideration,’ the German Foreign Office telegraphed to their envoy in London.15

  That Sunday night the doctors down at Osborne panicked that the queen might not survive until morning. Should they telegraph to Bertie to come from London to the Isle of Wight immediately? Intense discussion ensued, because they realised that if his mother was going to die before he arrived, it would be better if Bertie remained in the capital, in order to summon the Privy Council to begin the new reign. ‘Nobody is clear,’ recalled eyewitness Randall Davidson, ‘for lack of any precedents within people’s memory or knowledge.’16 The queen was the only one at Osborne who had been through the death of a monarch before, and she wasn’t talking.

  Davidson, Victoria’s old friend and confidant from Windsor Castle, had by 1901 been promoted from Dean of Windsor to Bishop of Winchester. He’d taken a chance and rushed to the Isle of Wight upon hearing that she was ill, despite ‘not exactly’ having been summoned. This involved crossing to Cowes in a storm, making the passage on a late-night boat incongruously packed with journalists and a noisy ‘great company of footballers’.17 Although he was a pompous man who could sometimes take himself rather too seriously, Davidson did have a firm sense of the momentousness of what would now unfold. It drove him, usefully to historians, to record every detail both in private notes and in letters to his wife.

  Davidson put down on paper the great fear, felt by many of the courtiers – and to a certain extent by Victoria herself – that there might be a long and uncertain period when she was dying but not dead. A regency, in other words. ‘They will want me to give in,’ she’d said a few days previously, ‘& to have a Regency to do my work. But they are wrong. I won’t, for I know they would be doing things in my name without telling me.’ Now it looked like death was near enough to avoid such a situation. ‘How splendid that she should just end like this,’ Davidson thought, ‘without even putting off her armour … & full of all her old fire & pluck & independence.’18 Princess Louise’s husband, also attending the deathbed gathering, described the waning of the queen as rather magnificent, like ‘the sinking of a great three-decker ship’.

  At 1.30 in the morning of Monday 21 January, Davidson wrote to his ‘beloved wife’ to tell her that having arrived at Osborne, and having seen the evidence of how seriously ill the queen really was, he’d experienced ‘one of the most solemn hours I am ever likely to spend in my life … the thoughts that rush in are overwhelming’.19 During the course of that Monday, though, Victoria seemed to recover a little. According to the official medical bulletin issued by Dr Reid and his colleague Sir Thomas Barlow, she’d ‘slightly rallied’. Sir Thomas was ‘a special authority on diseases of the brain’, called into attendance because Dr Reid suspected his patient had an ‘obstruction in the brain circulation’.20 The ‘right side of the face’ wasn’t working and moving normally, which made it look like she’d had a stroke. But Barlow determined that wasn’t ‘an apoplexy’, just a ‘failure of the vessels of the brain’.21

  By the end of Monday, both Bertie and Willy were at her bedside. They’d arrived together on the royal yacht. Characteristically, Bertie spent the journey across the Solent lounging in the saloon, while Willy occupied himself by annoying the ship’s captain on the bridge. Upon reaching Osborne, Willy cleverly disarmed his aunts by his humble behaviour. ‘I should like to see Grandmama before she dies,’ he said, ‘but if that is impossible I shall quite understand.’22 After that, Lenchen, Louise and Beatrice did not have the heart to forbid him, so Willy wormed his way in.

  Bertie’s optimistic presence now changed the tone of the medical bulletins: a second hopeful one was issued, even in the face of a returned decline, shifts of emphasis closely analysed by Tony Rennell. Desperately afraid of what his mother’s death meant for him, Bertie was praying that she might live as long as possible. Willy, though, had the better grasp of how the situation would play politically, and how the possibility of her lingering on incapacitated could damage both her legacy and the monarchy as an institution. Willy ‘poured out’ his views to anyone who’d listen, including Randall Davidson, saying ‘what a splendid life hers had been,’ and wishing that there might be no ‘mean or unfitting’ physical close.23

  On 22 January, the Tuesday morning, Randall Davidson was summoned early and urgently from the house near Osborne where he’d been sleeping. Osborne’s beds were all full, and there’d been no room for an uninvited guest like him. He nevertheless managed to get to Victoria’s bedroom soon after eight. There he found, at the doctors’ request, that ‘the Family were assembling, some of them not fully dressed. They knelt round the bed, the Prince of Wales on the Queen’s right, the German Emperor on her left … about 10 or 12 others were there. The Queen was breathing with difficulty … the nurse was kneeling behind her in the bed, holding up the pillows.’24 It was an extraordinary scene. Ironically, Victoria had been determined that such a public palaver should never take place. ‘That I shall insist is never the case if I am dying,’ she once wrote of a similar hullabaloo at the deathbed of a Prussian relative.25

  Gradually, as Victoria’s spirit sank still further and the tension grew, the friction between Willy and his aunts was once again felt. The room was crowded, rather too much so, and occasionally some of the relatives were persuaded to take a break from watching for the death. Victoria was not fully conscious, but seemed to understand that the end was near. Louise clearly heard her mother say, ‘I don’t want to die yet. There are several things I want to arrange.’26 Those present called out their names so that their mother, who was now fully blind, would know they were there – ‘Lenchen, mama’ – ‘and Baby’s here’ – and ‘Louise’. But no one gestured to Willy to speak.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be well to tell her that her grandson the Emperor is here too?’ Dr Reid whispered to Bertie. ‘No,’ the answer came, ‘it would excite her too much.�
�27

  After this apparent climax, though, Victoria once again rallied. Dr Reid cleared the room, and the family members went off to get dressed. Now Willy saw his chance for a quiet word. ‘Did you notice that everybody’s name in the room was mentioned to her except mine?’ he asked Dr Reid.

  Dr Reid relented. He asked Bertie directly for permission to let Willy go into his grandmother’s room on his own. It was granted. ‘Your Majesty,’ Dr Reid said to Victoria, ‘your grandson the Emperor is here. He has come to see you as you are so ill.’28 She smiled, and for five minutes they seemed to talk.

  But Willy’s triumph was perhaps empty. Some observers thought that Victoria, wandering in her mind, had in fact mistaken Willy for his dead father, Frederick, the greatly loved son-in-law who’d been husband to her eldest daughter Vicky. ‘The Emperor is very kind,’ she was heard to say, words that could have applied to the late Emperor Frederick as much as her own grandson.

  Surely, if any human being had occupied her mind that afternoon as it grew dark outside, it would have been Albert. At one point, Davidson spoke aloud the words of John Henry Newman’s poem, which seemed almost unbearably appropriate:

  And with the morn those Angel voices smile,

  Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile.

  One popular writer, an unauthorised insider who’d convincingly described the queen’s life and homes in 1897, and whose work would soon be rushed out as a new memorial edition, believed that Victoria’s fingers told the story of everything that really mattered about her. She still wore a plain gold ring of marriage, and memorial rings containing Albert’s hair. ‘In them,’ this writer claimed, ‘you will read all the homely romance of a happy wife, a fond mother, and a sorrowful but resigned widowhood, which are the greatest attributes of a good woman.’29

  This is perhaps Queen Victoria’s achievement: to have convinced her subjects that she wasn’t just their queen. More importantly, she was what they believed to have been an ordinary ‘good woman’. This part she played – utter theatre in some ways, but in others essentially true to her real self – might have been the magical ingredient that left the institution of the monarchy strong enough to thrive in twentieth-century Britain while crowns tumbled elsewhere. In this book I have questioned, sometimes undermined, the story of Victoria and Albert’s endlessly, superbly, unquestionably happy marriage. But for Victoria, his charm had never failed. For her, the bewitchment of the ‘angel’ to whom she had proposed marriage sixty-one years previously at Windsor Castle still held strong. I hope that she did dream now of meeting him again soon, if it made her happier.

  After five o’clock, there was another decline. Now Willy simply refused to budge. ‘My proper place is here,’ he told Randall Davidson, ‘I could not be away.’30 He remained there for two hours and more, supporting his grandmother with his one strong arm, the other having been weakened by a birth defect.31 Davidson, who had been asked to step outside and leave off praying, was called back in, at 6.25, just in time to begin the final prayers. Those present thought that Victoria fixed her eyes upon a painting of Christ over the fireplace. Lenchen described how ‘a look of radiance’ appeared on her mother’s face. Eyes open quite wide, she ‘saw beyond the Border land and had seen and met all her loved ones’.32

  But this is what Lenchen wanted to imagine. Others believed that the queen was not thinking of her human family at this final moment. One ‘very confidential channel’ revealed that her last words were to request that ‘her little dog should be allowed to jump up on her bed’. Perhaps it was Turi, successor to Dash, the dog who symbolised her bold and carefree side, who was by her side and on her mind as she died.33

  As Randall Davidson finished the blessing, Dr Reid was holding Victoria’s wrist, taking her pulse, and he finally let it drop at 6.30. The queen’s corpse remained supported by the arms of Dr Reid and Willy. ‘At 6.30 she breathes her last,’ Bertie later wrote in his diary.34 At least he, rather than his nephew, got to close his mother’s eyes.35

  Randall Davidson now left the room and, clearly distraught, scrawled in urgent red ink that a mere twenty-five minutes previously, ‘I was present at her death.’36 The paper is extraordinary, bringing us as close as possible to witnessing the ending of a long life. She’d been in her eighty-second year, and her sixty-fourth as queen.

  Outside the gates of Osborne, the gathered journalists, talking among themselves, did not at first notice Superintendent Charles Fraser, the late queen’s personal detective. Fraser had been told to wait until the Lord Chancellor, the Prime Minister, the Lord Mayor of London, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the sovereigns of Europe had all received the news by telegram. But finally, in the deep January dark, Fraser stepped out to say ‘Gentlemen … I grieve to say Her Majesty passed away at half-past six.’37 The journalists dashed, in a crowd, for East Cowes Post Office, with an undignified amount of jostling and scrumming. One of them described his fellow hacks as a ‘yelling stampede’, like a fox hunt in full cry.38 They were ravenous for statements and accounts of exactly what had happened. Randall Davidson, who was now preparing to officiate at the queen’s funeral, received an unseemly telegram:

  could you greatly oblige with 1600 words on Queen Victoria by Monday Honorarium ten Guineas.

  It was from the editor of Sunday at Home.39

  In 1897, seeing a certain amount of confusion and disagreement when the Duchess of Teck died without having made a proper will, Victoria decided to put her own wishes on paper. She left instructions ‘for my Dressers to be opened directly after my death and to be always taken about and kept by the one who may be travelling with me’.40

  Unbeknown to her family, these instructions listed a veritable jumble-sale of items she wanted to be placed with her in her coffin. Now Dr Reid, with the help of the dressers Victoria had trusted so much, faithfully carried out her final commands. The items were so many and varied that Reid had some difficulty fitting them all in. First of all, in went a cloak and dressing gown of Albert’s and a model of Albert’s hand in plaster. Then came the multitude of photographs she’d requested. After that, a coffin-shaped cushion hid them from sight before her body was placed on top of it.41 The list is intensely characteristic, revealing Victoria’s love of photographs, and of Albert. It also included the man who had, to some extent, been Albert’s successor. At the end of the list came a ‘photo of Brown and his hair in a case’, which Dr Reid wrapped in tissue paper before positioning them, as requested, in Victoria’s cold left hand.42 And later that day, before the coffin lid was screwed down, Bertie even allowed Abdul Karim to come to say goodbye.

  Once the coffin was sealed, it was transported by sea and land back to London, through the capital and on to the mausoleum near Windsor, where it was placed beside Albert’s. But that story is for Bertie’s reign, as King Edward VII. Our twenty-four days with Queen Victoria have come to an end.

  She lived a life of extraordinary privilege, experiencing great events and a magnificent lifestyle. Yet Victoria would rarely have said that she was happy, and my lasting feeling about her is pity. Many people envied her position as the winner of the Baby Race and the wearer of the crown. But when she discovered she was to be queen, Victoria already knew that it was the breaking, not the making, of her life. ‘I cried much,’ she said.43 Her mother had prepared her for the lonely royal trap in which both of their lives would be lived, a trap that tightly clasped so many Victorian women but which squeezed and nipped at a queen perhaps most damagingly of all. ‘You cannot escape your own feelings,’ Victoire told Victoria, all those years ago, ‘you cannot escape … from the situation you are born in’.44 You cannot escape. It was true. You cannot escape.

  Dinky Kew Palace where Victoria’s parents were married in a double wedding ceremony. Victoria’s father and uncle were both contestants in a slightly farcical ‘Baby Race’ to produce a legitimate heir to the throne.

  Contemporaries described Victoria’s German grandmother, Queen Charlotte, as having a ‘mulatto,�
� or mixed-race, cast to her features. She did have distant African ancestry via her Portuguese forbears.

  Victoria’s father Edward, Duke of Kent, unexpectedly found love in a marriage made purely for power and money. He died before his baby daughter’s first birthday.

  Victoire, Duchess of Kent, Victoria’s warm-hearted and affectionate mother, loved fashion and feathers, and was described being ‘very delightful in spite of want of brains’.

  Kensington Palace, set in its large and leafy gardens. Within the palace, the so-called ‘Kensington System’ kept the young princess under surveillance and control.

  Victoria’s father left her ‘nothing in the World but debts.’ He moved his family to Woolbrook Cottage in the seaside resort of Sidmouth to save money, but promptly died there from pneumonia.

  Victoria’s widowed German mother, amiable, malleable, not fluent in English, fell under the spell of the dashing but dubious Captain John Conroy.

  But Victoria’s governess Lehzen gave her pupil a strong moral compass. She used to tell the young princess that ‘she could pardon wickedness’ but not ‘weakness.’

  Victoria had few childhood friends, but among them was her little dog Dash. It was reported that on returning to Buckingham Palace on the evening of her coronation day she ran upstairs to give him a bath.

  A self-portrait of a miserable-looking Victoria at sixteen. The pressured environment of her teenage years disordered her eating habits.