Queen Victoria--Twenty-Four Days That Changed Her Life
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Yet Victoria sometimes managed to escape from the ‘System’ through her love of drawing, music, reading the novels of Sir Walter Scott, and above all, visiting the opera and theatre.
The American painter Thomas Sully clearly had a crush on the teenage queen, and created this delightful image of her youthful grace and charm.
The tartan velvet dress which Victoria was very likely wearing on the day she first met Albert. They shared a love of Scotland and Romantic literature.
Victoria’s sketch of Lord Melbourne, her first Prime Minister, with another of Victoria’s many dogs on his knee. People thought her strong feelings for older, glamorous ‘Lord M.’ were ‘sexual though she does not know it.’
Victoria’s coronation involved her travelling in her golden carriage as part of a vast, people-pleasing procession through London. She arrived at Westminster Abbey ‘as gay as a lark’ and ‘looking like a girl on her birthday’.
The solemn moment during the coronation ceremony when Victoria received the sacrament. The artist Charles Leslie was given a valuable seat near the front of the packed Abbey so he could watch closely to prepare for making this painting.
Victoria took an unfortunate and unjustified dislike to the unmarried Lady Flora Hastings. A merciless mob of courtiers claimed that Flora’s swollen stomach must mean she was pregnant out of wedlock.
Flora was forced to undergo an intrusive medical examination like this one. But after her death, her supposed pregnancy was revealed to have been the liver disease which killed her.
Victoria’s lack of sympathy for Flora became a dangerous scandal which spilled out of gloomy Buckingham Palace, and tarnished the young queen’s reputation.
Victoria’s family expected her to marry her German cousin Albert (right), pictured here with his rakish brother Ernest. Victoria and Albert met aged sixteen, but she insisted on waiting four years before proposing marriage.
After the scandal of Lady Flora Hastings’s death, Victoria summoned Albert back to Windsor Castle. He climbed the castle’s Grand Staircase (seen here) most reluctantly, having grown tired of waiting. But eventually he accepted her proposal.
Albert hated the balls and late nights that Victoria adored. But they did both love music, and played the piano and sang together nearly every day.
Victoria was determined that she was going to get married not as a queen but as a woman. She therefore wore what was considered to be a radically simple white gown.
The queen herself, a talented sketcher, designed the dresses of her bridesmaids. Her wedding was a bigger affair than she wanted, but Lord Melbourne insisted that this would please her people.
Victoria was known to regret her lack of height, but she was far from frumpy. This beautiful embroidered organza evening dress, worn in her early twenties, belies her reputation as the little old lady in black.
The sexy ‘secret’ picture Victoria commissioned as a surprise gift for Albert. He liked to see her like this, with loose hair and open mouth. In this image she is not his queen but his wife.
Victoria became pregnant straight after her wedding, ‘in for it at once,’ she said, ‘& furious I was.’ The birth of her children had to be witnessed by various dignitaries; here they inspect the new-born Vicky, Victoria’s eldest daughter.
Dr Ferguson later treated Victoria for what we might today call post-natal depression. His sketch of the bed from the side shows how a screen shielded Victoria’s lower body from the witnesses during childbirth, but they could see her head, and hear her.
Albert reformed the wasteful royal household, and masterminded magnificent Christmases at Windsor Castle including the German tradition of the tree.
Albert helped reconcile Victoria to her mother. Victoire, Victoria, Albert himself and seven of the couple’s nine children stand outside Osborne House, their spanking new Italianate palace on the Isle of Wight.
Victoria and Albert grew addicted to the new artform of photography. Candid shots like these made them look like a normal middle-class couple, thus delighting their middle-class subjects.
Albert quickly lost his looks and put on weight. Logical and intellectual where his wife was emotional and passionate, he worked himself too hard and took himself too seriously.
The Maharaja Duleep Singh was exiled from his kingdom in the Punjab by the British. Queen Victoria took him into protection as a kind of human pet.
Victoria was gratified when the Maharaja came to the Isle of Wight and played with her children. Here at Osborne her sons Arthur and Alfred dress up in some of the deposed Indian prince’s clothes.
The room at Windsor Castle in which Albert died was kept ‘alive’ as a sort of shrine. His daily jug of hot water continued to arrive, and years later his possessions still lay where he’d left them.
A marble carving of Albert’s hand as it was the day he died. Perhaps Victoria commissioned it so that she could continue to hold hands with her late husband. She loved the hand so much she even had a cast of it buried with her in her coffin.
Albert on his deathbed. His mysterious illness was exacerbated by stress, overwork and insomnia, partly caused by his extreme anxiety about his eldest son’s losing his virginity.
Victoria’s daughter Louise, a talented artist even as a little girl, imagines a heart-breaking scene of her mother asleep, and dreaming of a reunion with Albert.
Victoria let her daughter Beatrice (‘Baby’) get married only after a huge row. But once she’d given in, she lent Beatrice the very same treasured lace veil she’d worn at her own wedding.
During the Crimean War, Victoria came greatly to admire Florence Nightingale. But when the two finally met, Victoria was star-struck and tongue-tied.
John Brown, a Scottish servant from Balmoral, was the only servant who could tell the queen what to do. Their closeness sparked rumours of a secret marriage.
Victoria’s oldest son Bertie and his wife, the elegant Danish princess Alexandra. Bertie nearly died of typhoid fever here at his Norfolk home of Sandringham.
A bizarre ‘triumphal arch’ made entirely out of chairs. It was erected in celebration of High Wycombe’s furniture-making industry when Victoria visited the town in 1877.
Abdul Karim, Victoria’s ‘Munshi’ or teacher, became her trusted servant in later life. But other household members sought to discredit this unexpected favourite.
One of the reasons for Victoria’s enormous appeal in later life was her unthreatening, grandmotherly appearance. See how this official portrait has been heavily touched up to make her look a little younger, notably about the hair, chin and waist.
A grinning Victoria with her daughter, granddaughter and great-granddaughter. Those who knew the queen well often saw her smiling or laughing, but she grew ever more eccentrically reclusive with age.
Victoria died in the home Albert had built for her, Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, in 1901.
This photograph of the late queen laid out in her bedroom shows that she still slept with Albert to the very end of her life, in the form of a picture hanging over what had once been his pillow
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge with thanks the permission given by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II to quote from material in the Royal Archives at Windsor. Julie Crocker and staff at the Royal Archives could not have been more welcoming and helpful. In addition, I received much-appreciated advice from Terry Wheeler of Ramsgate Historical Society; Vivienne and Hilary Crane at the Royal Glen Hotel, Sidmouth; Michael Hunter, curator of Osborne House; Brian Golding of Sidmouth Local History Group; Karin Fernald, who likes Lehzen as much as I do; Felix Lancashire at The Royal College of Physicians; Matt McNamara of the Curragh History Forums; Mario Corrigan and James Durney from the Local Studies Department of Newbridge Library, County Kildare; Daisy Hay, Claire Isaacs, Beatrice Behlen and of course from my fellow Historic Royal Palaces curators Matthew Storey, Joanna Marschner, Claudia Williams and Deirdre Murphy. It was particularly rewarding to work closely for the summer of 20
17 with Matthew on our joint article about Queen Victoria’s wardrobe. My entire text was read by Peter Mandler and Jane Ridley, and I am immensely grateful to both of them for saving me from many errors. In the world of publishing, I love working with Felicity Bryan and her agency, and at Hodder & Stoughton with Veronique Norton, Caitriona Horne, Juliet Brightmore and especially editor Maddy Price. For putting up with me during the writing of this particular book I would like to thank my friends Jenni Waugh, Jamie Wallace, Isla Campbell, Alan Gardner and Katherine Ibbett, with apologies for my regrettable tendency towards spending my time with dead people rather than having fun with them. Finally, I dedicate my work to the best putters-up of all, Mark Hines and Ned Worsley.
Sources
Archives
Balliol College Archives
Lambeth Palace Library
Museum of London, especially former curator Kay Staniland’s files, including her transcription of the journal of Thomas Sully (1838)
The National Archives
Royal Archives
Royal College of Physicians
Royal Pharmaceutical Society
Wellcome Library
Printed
I must begin this section by gratefully acknowledging the authors whose books listed here were particularly helpful for the relevant chapters. Each of them would be the obvious place to turn for more detail on that particular period of the queen’s life. These titles include Lynne Vallone’s Becoming Victoria, New Haven and London (2001) for Chapter 4; Katherine Hudson’s A Royal Conflict, London (1994) for Chapter 5; Kathryn Hughes’s Victorians Undone, London (2017) for Chapter 9; Helen Rappaport’s Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert and the Death that Changed the Monarchy, London (2011) for Chapters 13 and 17; Mark Bostridge’s Florence Nightingale: The Woman and Her Legend, London (2008; 2009 edition) for Chapter 15; Jane Ridley’s Bertie: A Life of Edward VII, London (2012; 2013 edition) for Chapters 17 and 18 and her Victoria: Queen, Matriarch, Empress, London (2015) for Chapter 20; Daisy Hay’s Mr and Mrs Disraeli: A Strange Romance, London (2015) for Chapter 19; Kate Hubbard’s Serving Victoria, London (2012) and A. N. Wilson’s Victoria: A Life, London (2014) for Chapter 20; Matthew Dennison’s The Last Princess: The Devoted Life of Queen Victoria’s Youngest Daughter, London (2007) for Chapter 21; Shrabani Basu’s Victoria and Abdul, Stroud (2010, 2011 edition) for Chapter 22; Greg King’s Twilight of Splendor, Hoboken, N (2007) and the lecture notes on the Diamond Jubilee uploaded by film historian Luke McKernan to his personal website for Chapter 23, and Tony Rennell’s Last Days of Glory: The Death of Queen Victoria, London (2000) for Chapter 24.
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