QUEEN VICTORIA A Personal History

by Christopher Hibbert

  As with candle ends so with lavatory paper. Sir Arthur Ellis, an equerry, was disconcerted to discover that the lavatories at Windsor were supplied with 'NEWSPAPER'.

  With some order and economy imposed upon the household as well as upon the nursery and the royal farms, parks and gardens, life at Court assumed a quiet, dignified, respectable formality conformable to the Prince's taste.

  On being presented to the Queen, gentlemen went down on one knee and raised the right arm with the back of the hand uppermost. The Queen would then lay her hand on theirs so that they could brush it with their lips. They must not speak. On rising they were required to bow to Her Majesty, then to His Royal Highness. Ladies, on approaching the Queen, had to drop the trains of their dresses which were then spread out behind them by attendants armed with wands. Having made their curtseys, they had to retreat several paces backwards, contriving not to fall over their trains as they gathered them up over their arms.12

  The Queen, who ultimately became quite as inflexible as the Prince regarding the procedure to be observed at presentations, was most particular over the clothes to be worn: married ladies wore lappets; unmarried ladies wore veils; both wore a headdress of three white feathers. Anyone who wanted, for reasons of health, to wear a dress cut higher in the neck than was customary had to obtain permission to do so from the Lord Chamberlain. The permission was usually granted but the Queen insisted on the veils, lappets and feathers. A Mrs Sebastian Gassiot who, being unable to fasten her plumes in the usual way because ill health had obliged her 'to have all her hair cut quite short', wanted to know whether she might appear in a 'Dolly Varden cap with the plumes and lappets fastened to it', was told that the Queen, who had been 'much amused' by the request, had replied to it - 'decidedly no'.13

  Gentlemen, if they were not entitled to wear a uniform, had to appear in court dress with a claret-coloured coat, knee breeches, long white stockings, and buckled shoes and sword, although later on in her reign old men were allowed to wear breeches which came down to the ankle and buttoned there. They were meant to 'give the same impression as stockings'.

  The problem facing American Ministers abroad was settled by William Marcy, Secretary of State, who ruled that they should appear 'in the simple dress of an American citizen'. At that time the American Ambassador in London was James Buchanan, who later became President. Sir Edward Cust, the Queen's Master of the Ceremonies, told Buchanan that although the Queen would no doubt receive him whatever he wore, an ordinary suit would be disagreeable to her, so he appeared in a black coat and pantaloons, white waistcoat and cravat. The Queen greeted him with an 'arch but benevolent smile'.14

  If the Queen's views on court dress called forth a good deal of satirical comment in the Press, her views on the uses and scope of the Court Circular aroused much more. Every day, in the most ponderous and humourless way, her own and her family's activities were recorded under this heading in the newspapers. Every time the Queen left Windsor for 'the Paddington Terminus of the Great Western Railway', every time she and the Prince 'promenaded in the pleasure grounds adjacent to the Castle', every time he went 'shooting in the royal preserves', every time she invited an honoured guest to 'partake of a collation', the facts were recorded and detailed.

  'The Marmosets, pretty little dears, are in good health,' an apposite parody ran in a comic journal. 'The severe frost has not in any way injured the turtle-doves in the new dovecote. The tailless cats have been slightly affected owing to their having been indulged with a tete-a-tete on the Castle walls.'15 Sometimes there was no need of parody. Once 'Her Majesty was most graciously pleased during her stay at Windsor to enjoy most excellent health and spirits.' And later 'Her Majesty, attended by Viscountess Jocelyn, went riding in the Park on two ponies.'16

  I don't know why [one of the Queen's maids-of-honour wrote home to her father in the 1840s], but the dullness of our evenings is a thing impossible to describe. The Queen and Ladies sit at the round table and make conversation; and Flora and I sit at our own table and work; and the Prince generally stays in the other room talking with the Gentlemen till near bed-time; then he comes in with one or two big-wigs who sit at the Queen's table, where they sit till she gives the move at half-past ten, then the other gentlemen make a rush, from the whist table or from the other room, and we gladly bundle up our work, and all is over.17

  Visitors to Windsor Castle frequently complained of the lack of the 'sociability which makes the agreeableness of an English country house'. There was no room in which the guests could 'assemble, sit, lounge, and talk as they please'. The billiard room was so inaccessible it might as well have been in the town of Windsor; the library, 'although well stocked with books', was cold and unfurnished, 'offering none of the comforts of a habitable room'.18 If the 'most agreeable people in the world' were invited one hardly saw them, as the 'chacun chez soi system' was the fashion of the place.19

  Of course, some guests preferred to be left on their own, to do as they pleased throughout the day until dinner time; and Lord Clarendon told the Duchess of Manchester that he always liked Windsor better than any other country house because 'One is left to one's own devices and nobody does anything to amuse one.'20 But, for most, the lack of even the pretence of gaiety, the need to observe 'a continual air of deference and respect', was depressing and enervating.

  At dinner, when the guests met for the first time during the day, a military band usually 'covered the talk', as Lord Macaulay discovered, 'with a succession of sonorous tunes'.21 He found himself next to a 'foreign woman who could hardly speak English intelligibly'.22 Lord Ashley found that the band was very necessary to fill up the long 'pauses of conversation'. Even during Ascot races when a splendid banquet was given in St George's Hall, which appeared 'very magnificent, blazing with gold plate and light', it was, Charles Greville thought, despite the splendour, all 'very tiresome'.23 It could be particularly tiresome when the Duke of Wellington was one of the guests since he was so fearfully deaf and shouted so. "Very good-looking man,' he once bawled in Lady Lyttelton's ear, referring to the Tsar, Nicholas I, who sat immediately opposite and understood English perfectly. 'Always was so - scarcely altered since I saw him last - rather browner - no other change - very handsome man now. Don't you think so?' Lady Lyttelton felt compelled to shout an answer, 'Yes, very handsome, indeed.' On occasions the Duke would talk 'as loud as thunder' about some matter of delicate state importance which should have been mentioned only in Cabinet; and the Queen would blush 'over and over' and at last succeed in interrupting him by 'screaming out upon some other subject'.24

  After dinner there was sometimes a concert by the Castle band or by distinguished musicians invited to Windsor for this purpose. Occasionally there was an opera, the performers and orchestra being brought down to Windsor by special train and sent back afterwards. The performance was given in the Waterloo Gallery where the acoustics were not very good and where Francesco Tamagno, not having arrived in time to try out his voice there, once let himself go with such force that the Queen, who was as usual sitting in the front row, was quite stunned by the blast.25

  Occasionally, too, there was a play with a cast brought down from the West End. More often the play was performed, rather nervously, by members of the household and sometimes there was a presentation of tableaux in which all the members of the Royal Family joined and this was 'very wearying for the audience, who had to sit for two and a half hours with very long intervals between the tableaux'.26

  But boring as these performances usually were, it was better to have something to do after dinner, Charles Greville decided - having sat through a series of declamations by Mile Rachel in French which he could not understand - for otherwise there was nothing at all with which to occupy the evening. And getting through the evening was always the 'great difficulty in Royal society'.27

  * * *

  The Queen was at her most contented when there were no guests whom she did not know very well to entertain; or when there were only a few close friends
staying the night or, best of all, when she and Prince Albert were alone together. Later, after the birth of their children, she confessed to her eldest daughter that she begrudged the time she had to be with them, when she 'longed to be alone with dearest Papa'. The times spent with him were 'always her happiest moments'.28

  She described them in great detail, providing a vivid account of the early mornings when the wardrobe maid came into their bedroom at seven o'clock to open the shutters and, usually, the window too. The Prince, who slept in long white drawers enclosing his feet, would get up and put on his quilted dressing gown. He then went to his sitting room where 'his green German lamp was lit'.

  'He brought the original one from Germany,' the Queen recorded, '& we always have 2 on our tables which everywhere stand side by side (& shall ever do so) & wrote letters, read etc. & at a little after eight ... he came to tell me [in German] to get up.' He usually brought with him letters which he had written in English for her to read through for him in order to check his spelling and grammar. After his last child was born and was able to walk and talk she went into his dressing room to watch him dress and see him put on the blue ribbon of the Order of the Garter which he always wore under his waistcoat. When she arrived to find him dressed already she would 'make dearest Albert laugh so by saying, "What a pity"!' The child 'stopped with him till he' came out of his room. He then walked down the passage to breakfast with her, holding her hand.29

  In the evenings when the Queen and Prince were once more alone together they often read to each other. 'I sit on a sofa, in the middle of the room with a small table before it, on which stand a lamp & candlestick,' she wrote contentedly, 'Albert sitting in a low arm-chair, on the opposite side of the table with another small table in front of him on which he usually stands his book.'

  'I have been so happy there,' she wrote another day in the summer of 1843, when expressing regret at having to leave one royal residence for another, 'but where am I not happy now?'30

  The Prince seemed contented now, too, when there were no difficult guests or intimidating women to put him ill at ease. Long gone were the evenings when he would play double chess alone while the Queen talked to the Prime Minister, and the ladies and gentlemen of the Household were bored to death. The Prince now played more rowdy games and even joined in Blind Man's Buff with the ladies, made puns, invented riddles, took part in charades, danced the 'wildest, merriest' dances, played games with the children, gave them magic lantern shows, arranged presents for them on their birthdays in the 'present room', and once built a house for the Princess Royal with her wooden bricks, a house so tall that he had to stand on a chair to put the roof on and even then to reach above his head. 'Such a fall it made! He enjoyed it much the most.'

  He was even capable of laughing at himself now and had a large collection of caricatures, some of which lampooned him mercilessly.31 One evening after dinner he showed some of these to the Queen and her ladies, 'running from one to the other, and standing over us to see how we laughed,' Lady Lyttelton wrote, 'and laughing so loud himself as to be quite noisy and boyish. But' - and there was so often this 'but' - 'his voice! It is sadly disenchanting.'32

  One evening the ladies and gentlemen of the Household danced 'the reel con amore which was very amusing', so the Hon. Georgiana Liddell, one of the Queen's maids-of-honour, said, and 'made the Queen laugh heartily'. On another evening, after quadrilles and Roger de Coverley, the Queen proposed that everyone who could dance at all should join in a country dance. 'The obedience was like the effect of a magical horn,' Lady Lyttelton thought. 'Lord Aberdeen [the Foreign Secretary in Peel's cabinet] looked more like a scarecrow than ever, quite as stiff as timber, and the countenance of Sir Robert Peel, so mincing on his legs and feet', was 'full of the funniest attempt to look unconcerned' while in reality he was 'very naturally, both shy and cross'.33

  But the Queen watched Albert, so beautiful, so kind, so good. He had the grace of a ballet dancer and once performed like one when the Queen was criticized for looking grumpy. She had been very tired, she said, and might have looked cross, 'What am I to do another time?' she asked him. The Prince advised her, so Lady Lyttelton said, 'to behave like an opera dancer after a pirouette, and always to show all her teeth in a fixed smile ... He accompanied the advice with an immense pirouette and prodigious grin of his own, such as few people could perform after dinner without being sick, ending on one foot and t' other in the air.'34

  In later years the Queen remembered with particularly wistful pleasure the evenings in her dressing room before she and Prince Albert went to bed. She pictured him leaning against the fireplace, 'talking over the company - and what had passed - such a pleasure; sometimes my maids would come in and begin to undress me - and he would go on talking, would make his observations on my jewels and ornaments and give my people good advice as to how to keep them or would occasionally reprimand if anything had not been carefully attended to ... He would then go to his dressing-room ... I undressed quickly - but alas! I dawdled and often read while my hair was doing afterwards...'35

  Chapter 19 ROYAL QUARRELS

  'Victoria is too hasty and passionate for me to be able often to speak of my difficulties.'

  In February 1841, six months before the formation of Sir Robert Peel's administration, the Queen and Prince Albert asked the Duke of Wellington - now considered by the Queen the 'best friend' that she and her husband had - to represent the Duke of Saxe-Coburg at the christening of their first child, Victoria.

  'I was never so well received,' the Duke had recently written after a visit to Windsor. 'I sat next to the Queen at dinner. She drank wine repeatedly with me; in short, if I was not a Milksop, I should become a Bottle Companion.'1 He went out of his way to please her. At a military review in Windsor Park he gave orders that the guns should remain silent until she had left the parade ground, knowing that she hated the noise of artillery. There would be no firing, he assured her; but some mistake had been made and no sooner were the words out of his mouth than 'bang went the guns all down the line!' It was so irresistibly funny that the Queen 'burst into an uncontrollable fit of laughter'. But the Duke was furious; he positively 'blew up'; no one could appease him; and he gave orders for the gunners to leave the field immediately.2

  He was more successful in his attentions to the Queen at a concert at Buckingham Palace. She had a bad cold and ran out of handkerchiefs before the performance was over. The Duke, who was sitting immediately behind her, noticed her plight; and, since he always carried a reserve supply in his pocket, was able to help her. 'I immediately slipped one of mine into her hand,' he related contentedly, 'then a second, then a third; and whispered I had a fourth at her service should she require it.'3

  The Queen's daughter, Princess Victoria, behaved with great propriety and like a 'Christian' at her christening, so the child's father reported. 'She was awake but did not cry at all and seemed to crow with immense satisfaction at the lights and brilliant uniforms, for she is very intelligent and observing.'4

  The child's mother, however, was in no such contented mood; for she was already pregnant again and exasperated and depressed as a result. 'What made me so miserable,' she later declared, 'was to have the first two years of my married life utterly spoilt by this occupation. I cld enjoy nothing, not travel about or go about with [my husband]. If I had waited a year ... it wld. have been very different.' As it was, she had to 'suffer aches and sufferings ... miseries and plagues'; she had to 'give up enjoyments', take 'constant precautions'. She felt 'so pinned down', with her 'wings clipped'. In short, the female sex was a 'most unenviable one'.5

  A 'poor woman' was 'bodily and morally the husband's slave,' she complained. When heavily pregnant she felt more like a cow or a dog, a rabbit or a guinea-pig than a human being - women who enjoyed being pregnant were 'disgusting'. Besides, she got so depressed and ill-tempered, and then she had terrible quarrels with the Prince as, for instance, when he rebuked her for not paying proper attention when they were catalogu
ing prints together. She lost her temper on such occasions. He would leave the room; she would follow him 'to have it all out'. He would retreat to his room to write her a letter, pained and reasonable, which would exasperate her; and then, in the end, she would be filled with remorse and pity and resolve to curb that hasty temper which she so often lamented in the pages of her journal.

  Twice in October 1841, she feared she was going to give birth prematurely, and for days on end she felt 'wretched ... low and depressed'. While quite fond of children she did not at all care for babies, when all they were capable of was what she called 'that terrible frog-like action'. An ugly baby was a 'very nasty object, and the prettiest was frightful when undressed'. She would certainly not breast-feed the object as her mother had breast-fed her.

  The thought of having another of these creatures filled her with dismay and disgust. She gave birth to it on the morning of 9 November; and it was as she feared it might be. 'My sufferings were really very severe, and I don't know what I should have done, but for the great comfort and support my beloved Albert was to me during the whole time.'6 The baby, 'a large boy', appeared at twelve minutes to eleven and was, as the mother recorded, 'taken to the Ministers for them to see'. He was to be given the names Edward, after his grandfather, and Albert, after his father; and what a pleasure it was to his mother that he was to have that 'dearest name!'