The Queen’s House

by Edna Healey

  After four days of honeymoon at Windsor, the newly married couple left for Germany, leaving Queen Victoria somewhat relieved to have Prince Albert to herself again. Prince Albert missed the daughter who had been, of all their children, the most like him.

  In 1857 Prince Albert also lost the companionship of Stockmar, who finally retired to Germany. He was now old and frail and wanted to spend his last years in his own country. He bequeathed his son to Vicky, now Princess Frederick William of Prussia, to act as her secretary in her German court. For more than twenty years Baron Stockmar had devoted his life to the creation of a stable British monarchy. It is difficult to know what drove him, besides a deep admiration for Britain and its constitution. But his influence on the transformation of the Court from the sleazy corruption of the Regency period should never be underestimated. As a doctor with an interest in psychology he had observed closely all the players in the royal game, from George III onwards. In the young Prince of Wales he could see the family face. When Bertie, as he was known to his family, threw the crockery or was brutal to his equerries, he remembered how the uncles had loved to smash and hurt. When he saw how charming he could be, he recalled how the handsome young Prince Regent had been transformed into a gross and self-indulgent King. When he saw the Prince of Wales wild with irrational rage he recognized the face of Queen Victoria herself; she herself confessed that her son was a caricature of herself.* For the previous ten years Stockmar had helped to prepare the Prince of Wales for kingship. But not even Stockmar could create character, and Bertie was quite unlike his father. Stockmar and Prince Albert had planned his education in numerous memoranda. If Edward VII did not turn out to be the complete Renaissance man, it was not for want of their trying. Punch saw the dangers:

  Thou dear little Wales – sure the saddest of tales

  In the tale of the studies with which they are cramming thee;

  In thy tuckers and bibs, handed over to Gibbs,

  Who for eight years with solid instruction was ramming thee.

  Then, to fill any nook Gibbs had chanced to o’erlook,

  In those poor little brains, sick of learned palaver,

  When thou’dst fain rolled in clover, they handed thee over,

  To the prim pedagogic protection of Tarver …

  Where next the boy may go to swell the farrago,

  We haven’t yet heard: but the Palace they’re plotting in,

  To Berlin, Jena, Bonn, he’ll no doubt be passed on to,

  And drop in, for a finishing touch, p’raps, at Gottingen.

  ’Gainst indulging the passion for the high pressure fashion

  Of Prince-training, Punch would uplift a loyal warning;

  Locomotives we see, over-stoked soon may be,

  Till the supersteamed boiler blows up some fine morning.85

  Stockmar and Prince Albert had striven to train the wayward young man. In April 1849 Bertie had been given a suite of his own in Buckingham Palace and a kind young tutor, Henry Birch, replaced in 1851 by a pedantic classical scholar. He was given short spells at Oxford and Cambridge Universities, but always under the strictest control.

  Oxford improved him and when, on a visit to Germany, Bertie visited Baron Stockmar in his retirement the old man was delighted with him. Prince Albert was overjoyed that Stockmar had seen such improvement in him. During the long vacation of 1860, Bertie made an official visit to Canada and America, where he was fêted and for the first time developed a confidence in himself. His boyish charm captivated the New World, as it would do all his life. He spent a short spell at Cambridge University. In 1861 during a vacation he spent in infantry training at the Curragh Camp near Dublin, his fellow officers decided to carry on the education of the Prince by smuggling an actress, Nellie Clifden, into his room. It was at Curragh that Bertie learned that delight in women that would mark him throughout his life as Edward VII.

  The Prince Consort’s health had begun to cause concern in the late 1850s. He was seriously over-stressed: he had, in fact, shouldered much of the responsibility of the Queen, and indeed had worked harder than any cabinet minister for many years. Foreign affairs, which he well understood, concerned him deeply. The Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny had worn him down; and there had been a sudden flurry of French hostility roused by a plot, planned in England, to assassinate the Emperor Napoleon III – no throne was safe.

  Prince Albert had been completely drained by his work for the Great Exhibition of 1851 and throughout the decade had continued to take an active part in the encouragement of science, industry and the arts.

  So in the autumn of 1860, when he and Queen Victoria paid their last visit to his old home in Coburg, Prince Albert was tired and dispirited. He was seriously shaken by a carriage accident there and Stockmar, who was now in retirement there, visited him immediately afterwards and was deeply concerned. The old man, as he said, had never till now realized how much he loved the Prince and shrewdly foresaw that ‘here was a man incapable of fighting an illness’.86

  Walking around his beloved home, Prince Albert seemed to realize that it would be the last time and wept uncontrollably.

  The year 1861 brought tragedy. In March the Duchess of Kent died, leaving the Queen heartbroken. Reading through her mother’s papers she realized for the first time how much her mother had loved her.

  In spite of the tender love of the Prince, Queen Victoria was in such low spirits all that summer that there were rumours that she might be inheriting the mental instability of her grandfather, George III.

  So, when Prince Albert fell ill in November 1861 with what he thought was a chill, they were both at a low ebb. The Prince was, in fact, in the early stages of typhoid fever. Nevertheless he worked on ceaselessly.

  On 11 November a devastating blow fell: news reached the ears of the Queen and Prince of the scandal of the Prince of Wales’s affair with the actress at the Curragh. The news was deeply shocking, especially as they hoped to arrange a marriage with the lovely Princess Alexandra of Denmark.

  Prince Albert travelled in the cold November to Cambridge, where he talked long into the night with his son, urging him to marry soon, for ‘you must not, you dare not be lost. The consequences for this country and for the world would be too dreadful.’87 Father and son were reconciled; but Queen Victoria always believed that it was the stress of this journey that killed Prince Albert. Certainly it must have been one of the factors that weakened his resistance to the typhoid fever which took hold in early December.

  He worked to the end. He made his last important political contribution when he was almost too weak to hold a pen, redrafting a terse memorandum that the Foreign Secretary, Lord John Russell, was proposing to send to America which might well have dragged Britain into the American Civil War. His tactful draft turned away the wrath of the Federal government, but it was his last memorandum.

  He was obsessed by the fear of typhoid, which had recently killed his favourite cousin, the King of Portugal, and the onset of fever convinced him that death was near.

  Again and again in his delirium he called for Stockmar, just as the dying Princess Charlotte had done so long ago. But Stockmar, who had given him so much, could not give him what he needed now: the will to live.

  On 14 December 1861 at 10.45 p.m. Prince Albert died. It was not until 1874 that the distraught Queen could bring herself to record his last moments in her Journal. She had asked for ‘ein kuss’ and ‘he moved his lips, then two or three perfectly gentle breaths were drawn, the hand clasping mine …’88

  Prince Albert’s was the simplest of private funerals, held at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, on a chill day, under a leaden sky. There was none of the paraphernalia of mourning, but his coffin was followed by his brother, Ernest, Duke of Saxe-Coburg, the Prince of Wales and little Prince Arthur, all three racked by uncontrollable grief. Prince Albert had been a demanding perfectionist, but their tear-stained faces witnessed deep love and a profound sense of loss.

  The Queen was not there. She had be
en taken to Osborne, from where she sent a simple wreath of violets round a white camellia. Leopold, King of the Belgians, immediately offered to come to her. On 20 December she replied like a broken child:

  My own DEAREST KINDEST Father – For as such have I ever loved you! The poor fatherless baby of eight months is now the utterly broken-hearted and crushed widow of forty-two. My life as a happy one is ended! The world is gone for me … it is henceforth for our poor fatherless children – for my unhappy country, which has lost all in losing him … and in only doing what I know and feel – he would wish, for he is near me – his spirit will guide and inspire me…,89

  Before he came, on 26 December, she wrote again, this time to emphasize that ‘no human power will make me swerve from what he decided’. And she was determined that ‘no person, may he be ever so good … is to lead or guide me’90 – a hint perhaps that her beloved uncle should not try to dominate again.

  She was much soothed by Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s dedication to his new edition of his Idylls of the King:

  … we see him as he moved,

  How modest, kindly, all-accomplish’d wise,

  With what sublime suppression of himself…

  … but thro’ all this tract of years

  Wearing the white flower of a blameless life,

  Before a thousand peering littlenesses,

  In that fierce light that beats upon a throne …

  Hereafter, thro’ all times, Albert the Good.

  Baron Stockmar, heartbroken, wrote honest words that she would remember all her life. ‘You will grow accustomed to it, but you will never get over it.’91 And she never did.

  Albert, Prince of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, with the help of Baron Stockmar of Coburg, had transformed Buckingham Palace and in so doing had contributed stability and prestige to the monarchy, which it had lacked during the reigns of Queen Victoria’s uncles.

  The Widow of Windsor

  In the following year, however, the invisible ‘widow of Windsor’ threatened to destroy their work. Stockmar would have told her that an unseen monarch diminishes the monarchy and that an expensive but unused palace rouses republicans.

  For two years she remained in seclusion at Osborne and for twenty years she was seen little in public. Buckingham Palace was deserted and shuttered, the state rooms shrouded in dust sheets, although she allowed her sons, Princes Alfred and Leopold, to have apartments on the second floor. She spent long periods in Balmoral and received her ministers at Windsor. She obstinately refused to delegate work to her eldest son. When on 5 March 1863 the Prince of Wales married Princess Alexandra, the longed-for wedding took place at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, but the Queen watched from a dark closet, high above the altar, and did not attend the breakfast. Even after his marriage she refused to allow him to take over Buckingham Palace.

  When Queen Victoria’s beloved Uncle Leopold died on 10 December 1865, she lost a surrogate father and a lifelong pillar of support. Now she was truly alone. For a while, in her isolation she thought she would go mad; she longed for death.

  Gradually, however, that tough spirit that had saved her before she knew Prince Albert reawakened and with it her own intelligence, so long subordinated to that of the Prince. Driven by that royal sense of duty which had impelled even her predecessors, she gradually took up again the work of a queen. Queen Victoria emerged Queen in her own right, standing on her own feet. But she desperately missed a strong right arm, which she found, surprisingly, in her Scottish ghillie John Brown, who combined ‘the offices of groom, footman, page and maid I almost might say, as he is so handy about cloaks and shawls’. In February 1865 she decided that he should ‘remain permanently and make himself useful in other ways besides leading my pony as he is so very dependable’.92 He began with a wage of £120 a year; later it was raised to £310.

  So John Brown became an essential part of the Court, to the displeasure of the rest of the Household. John Brown was always there – behind her chair, on the box of her carriage, handing the Queen her shawl. Honest and outspoken, he was what she needed, but he infuriated ministers and courtiers with his presumption. Her relationship with him is a constant theme for gossip-mongers, but anyone who has studied the character of the Queen or her times can have no doubt that Queen Victoria would never have allowed the relationship to have overstepped the boundary between mistress and servant. It was the kind of friendship that kings and queens often have with devoted servants with whom they are totally at ease and who give them constant support.

  Queen Victoria had, too, the help of her equerry, Henry Ponsonby, who became her Private Secretary in 1870. He gave her years of loyal service until January 1895, when a severe stroke released him. He was wise, dedicated and honourable, with the great gift of humour. He was succeeded by Colonel Arthur Bigge, who stayed with her until her death.

  To the annoyance of the public, she shunned public appearances. It was not until 6 February 1866 that she consented to open Parliament, but then she drove from Buckingham Palace in her carriage, not the state coach, and took her place on the throne, silent, veiled in black, wearing not a crown but her black widow’s cap, leaving the Lord Chancellor to read her speech.

  Two years later she consented to open Parliament again. She drove once again from Buckingham Palace in her ordinary carriage – with the windows lowered so that she could be seen; but she was angered by the shouts of demonstrators and the fury in their ‘nasty faces’. This time her speech from the throne announced her government’s intention to pass the Second Reform Bill. Once again she could not wait to leave the Palace and London. Prince Albert’s rooms in Buckingham Palace were kept exactly as he left them, but his spirit was not there.

  From 1864, she began holding afternoon receptions at the Palace, and in 1868, gave her first ‘breakfast’ – as garden parties at the Palace were called – since she was becoming aware that her critics were growing. Why, they asked, should the taxpayers pay for a Palace that was so underused? Again and again successive Prime Ministers urged her to use Buckingham Palace – or at least to let the Prince and Princess of Wales live there. But the Queen was adamant. Bertie could not take her place: she remembered too vividly the stories of the Prince Regent’s behaviour during her grandfather’s illness and Bertie showed alarming signs of the family inheritance.

  Prime Minister Gladstone managed to persuade her to receive the Shah of Persia at Windsor in 1873 and to invite him to stay at Buckingham Palace. She wore her Koh-i-noor diamond to impress him at the Windsor banquet, but it was just as well that she did not receive him personally at Buckingham Palace. She heard, without amusement, of his entourage of lovely ladies, of his feasts of roasted lamb spread on her priceless carpets and how he watched a boxing match in the Palace garden.

  In spite of her dislike of public appearances, the Queen was determined to maintain the prestige of the British monarchy. When her son, Prince Alfred, became engaged to Marie, the only daughter of the Tsar of Russia, she was infuriated at the Tsar’s suggestion that she should go to Cologne to meet Marie. To the Queen’s daughter Princess Alice, who encouraged her to go, she raged,

  I do not think dear child that you should tell me who have been nearly 20 years longer on the throne than the Emperor of Russia, and am the doyenne of Sovereigns and who am a reigning Sovereign which the Empress is not – what I ought to do. The proposal received on Wednesday for me to be at Cologne … Tomorrow was one of the coolest things I ever heard.93

  Victoria Regina et Imperatrix

  It was Disraeli who brought the Queen back into the public eye. She had been fascinated by him ever since 1852 when, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he sent her Parliamentary reports that were ‘just like his novels’. Queen Victoria had no racial prejudice and rebuffed the antiSemitic gibes directed at the brilliant young Jew.

  When, in February 1868, at the age of sixty-four, Disraeli succeeded Lord Derby as Prime Minister, the Queen applauded. ‘A proud thing’, she wrote to Vicky, ‘for a man risen from the peo
ple to have attained.’94

  With consummate skill Disraeli wooed the Queen back to life, encouraged her to take her ladies for a holiday to Switzerland and explained politics to her, making her feel once again in the centre of affairs. In return she sent him primroses from Osborne.

  When he was replaced by Gladstone, she was as distressed as she had been when Melbourne had lost power. Her antipathy to the Grand Old Man has been often described. It was Disraeli who was her favourite. On 10 February 1874 he was back again as her Prime Minister.

  When in 1876 the Queen decided she wished to be Empress of India, Disraeli encouraged her even though there was fierce opposition in Parliament.

  Prosaic and sensible though the Queen was, there was also in her a latent love of the exotic. Though she had disliked Brighton, she was surrounded by oriental fantasies brought from the Pavilion; and she never forgot her wild ride as a girl of seven when the old George IV had scooped her up in his carriage and whirled her to his magical Chinese pagoda on the shores of Virginia Water.

  Her immediate desire was to outdo the Tsar of Russia and to secure the place of the Queen of England in the precedence charts of the world. On New Year’s Day 1877 Queen Victoria signed herself ‘Victoria Regina et Imperatrix’. She had taken her place in the world again, and this time without the help of Uncle Leopold, Stockmar or Prince Albert. Disraeli next laid at the imperial feet the high road to India: the Suez Canal, which on 25 November 1877 he snapped up from the bankrupt Khedive of Egypt for a bargain £4 million. Skilfully he fed Queen Victoria’s renewed enthusiasm for the great world destiny of Britain. The imperial triumph had begun.