QUEEN VICTORIA A Personal History

by Christopher Hibbert

  Both the Queen and Prince had at this time grown fond of Windsor, despite its many disadvantages and occasional whiffs of noxious smells (although the Queen was in later years to dislike it much, describing it as 'prison-like, so large and gloomy', an 'undesirable and unenjoyable residence'). But it could scarcely be described as cosy, or, to use a favourite word of both the Queen's and Prince's, gemutlich.9 Nor could Buckingham Palace which, when King George IV rebuilt the less grandiose house his father had bought as a London retreat from St James's, had never been intended as a family home. The Queen complained to Peel of its 'total want of accommodation for our own little family which is fast growing up ... If [alterations] were to be begun this autumn [1845] it could hardly be occupied before the spring of 1848 when the Prince of Wales would be nearly seven and the Princess Royal nearly eight years old and they cannot possibly be kept in the nursery any longer. A provision for this purpose ought therefore to be made this year. Independent of this, most parts of the Palace are in a sad state and will ere long require further outlay to render them decent for the occupation of the Royal Family or any visitors the Queen may have to receive ... Something must absolutely be done during this Session.'

  The Queen was supported in her views by Edward Blore, the architect employed by William IV to complete the work which had been started by John Nash for George IV but had been left unfinished at King William's death. Blore contended that there were no rooms in the Palace which could be converted into day and night nurseries except poky attics designed for use as servants' quarters. Moreover, the state apartments were inadequate and the kitchens a disgrace. Nor were there any suites suitable for distinguished guests from abroad. Indeed, Prince Albert was quite right to consider the whole Palace 'a disgrace to the Sovereign and the Nation'.10

  Blore proposed enclosing Nash's courtyard by a completely new east front with a central balcony facing down the Mall and removing the Marble Arch which stood in front of the courtyard to a position at the top of Park Lane, where it remains today. It was estimated that this would cost £150,000 - a sum subsequently voted by Parliament - and it was hoped that at least part of this would be covered by the sale of the Marine Pavilion at Brighton.

  The Queen had decided that the lack of privacy at Brighton was intolerable. During a visit there in the winter of 1845 the crowds 'behaved worse' than she had ever seen them do before, like 'a pack of ill-bred dogs', in the words of Punch, hunting their quarry 'to the very gates of the Pavilion'.11 'We were mobbed by all the shopboys in the town, who ran and looked under my bonnet,' the Queen complained, 'treating us just as they do the band, when it goes to the parade. We walked home as fast as we could. '12

  Fortunately by then she and Prince Albert had found a place which would afford them the seclusion they could never hope to enjoy at Brighton or in London, or, indeed, at Windsor.

  * * *

  'During our usual morning walk,' the Queen had written one day in 1843, 'Albert & I talked of buying a place of our own, which would be so nice; perhaps Norris Castle might be something to think of.'13 She had been much taken with the Isle of Wight as a girl; and now that she could afford it, she thought how wonderful it would be to have a place there of one's own, quiet and retired. 'God knows how willingly I would always live with my beloved Albert and our children in the quiet and retirement of private life and not be the constant object of observation and of newspaper articles,' she told King Leopold; and later she made the same observation to one of her German relations: 'Every year I feel less and less desire for the so-called "worldly pleasures", and if it were not my duty to give receptions and banquets, I should like to retire to the Country with my husband and children. '14

  The Isle of Wight seemed to offer an ideal sanctuary, secluded from the outside world, yet not too remote from London, in fact less than three hours' journey away by rail and steamer.

  Sir Robert Peel encouraged the Queen and the Prince in their plans and brought to their attention a Georgian house overlooking the Solent near Cowes with some 800 acres. Here, at Osborne House, Prince Albert could be free from the circumlocutory delays and restrictions of the Office of Woods and Forests and of those 'other charming departments' which really were, as the Queen put it, 'the plague of one's life'.15 At Osborne he could look forward to becoming, as he told the Dowager Duchess of Coburg, 'partly forester, partly builder, partly farmer and partly gardener'.16

  The estate belonged to a daughter of the Duke of Grafton, Lady Isabella Blatchford, who was asking £30,000 for it. This was considered too high; so the Prince gave Lady Isabella the impression that he and the Queen were not all that keen to buy it. He would, however, consider renting it for a year to see how they liked it. A figure of £28,000 was then offered and accepted. But then Lady Isabella changed her mind and demanded the original asking price. Eventually a figure of £26,000, excluding the furniture and farm crops, was agreed between the parties; and a further £18,600 was spent on additional farmland purchased from Winchester College. By the end of 1847 a total of £67,000 had been spent on an estate of 1,727 acres.17

  Charles Greville, who went to Osborne House for a Council meeting four months after the Royal Family moved in, did not think much of it. 'A miserable place,' he considered it, 'such a vile house' that, before the meeting, 'the Lords of the Council had no place to remain in but the entrance hall ... Fortunately the weather was fine' so they walked about in the grounds. The Queen 'will spend first and last a great deal of money there,' Greville commented, 'but it is her own money and not the nation's. I know not where she gets it, but Graham [Sir James Graham, the Home Secretary] told me She had money. He also told me she is naturally inclined to be generous, but the Prince is fond of money.'18

  Greville might think it 'very ugly'; but the Queen was entranced by Osborne House and its surroundings: it was 'so snug and nice' - a description, given in a letter to King Leopold, which Theodore Martin thought it as well to replace in his printed version with the more queenly 'pleasant'.19 'It is impossible to see a prettier place,' she told Lord Melbourne, 'with woods and valleys and points de vue, which would be beautiful anywhere, but all this near the sea ... is quite perfection. We have a charming beach quite to ourselves. The sea is so blue and calm that the Prince said it was like Naples. And then we can walk about anywhere by ourselves without fear of being followed and mobbed.'20 She could go down to the sea undisturbed:

  Drove down to the beach with my maid [she wrote in her journal one summer's day in 1847] and went into the bathing machine, where I undressed and bathed in the sea (for the first time in my life), and a very nice bathing woman attending me. I thought it delightful till I put my head under the water, when I thought I should be stifled.21

  In a letter to Peel she was equally enthusiastic: 'We are more and more delighted with this lovely spot, the air is so pure and fresh, in spite of the hottest sun which oppresses one so dreadfully in London and even at Windsor ... The combination of sea, trees, woods, flowers of all kinds ... make it, to us, a perfect little Paradise.'22

  She thought the original house, 'our dear little Home', 'all our very own', quite large enough; but Prince Albert did not agree.23 So it was demolished and a much bigger house, an Italianate villa with two campanile - the Clock Tower and the Flag Tower - was built in its place. There was a central Pavilion for the Royal Family, a guest wing containing apartments for the Duchess of Kent, as well as rooms for visitors, and another wing for members of the Household who were also to be accommodated in cottages in the grounds. It was designed by Prince Albert himself with the help of his artistic adviser, the painter and engraver Ludwig Gruner, and the master builder Thomas Cubitt, a former ship's carpenter who had made a fortune building houses in Clapham Park as well as Belgravia (one of these George Anson's). The Queen laid the foundation stone of the new building with its much criticized stucco facades on 23 June 1845, and the family moved in just over a year later.24

  'Nobody caught cold or smelled paint,' Lady Lyttelton recorded. 'Everything i
n the house is quite new [much of the furniture, including the painted billiard table with slate legs, was designed by Prince Albert himself] and the dining room looked very handsome.[xx] The windows, lighted by the brilliant lamps, must have been seen far out to sea'; and, when the shutters were closed, the looking-glass fixed to their inner sides brilliantly reflected the bright light from the chandeliers.25

  As the Queen formally entered the house for the first time a Scottish maid-of-honour threw a shoe in after her in the traditional belief of her countrymen that this would bring good luck; and, after dinner that night, in accordance with a tradition of the country of his own birth, Prince Albert quoted two lines of German meaning 'entering a new house is a solemn thing to do'. 'It was dry and quaint', being a quotation from Luther, Lady Lyttelton commented on his rendition, 'but we all perceived that he was feeling it.'26

  From the beginning, the Queen loved Osborne, to which more land was eventually added until the estate extended to over 2,000 acres. She was to come here twice a year, from the middle of July until the end of the third week in August and for Christmas from 18 December to 23 February. She took great pride in the handsome rooms which owed so much to Albert's discernment and taste, the intertwined letters V and A which celebrated their ideal partnership, the arrangement of the pictures, of William Dyce's Neptune Entrusting Command of the Sea to Britannia which was placed at the top of the Pavilion staircase, and Winterhalter's Florinda, her birthday present to him (another riot of naked flesh, described by the Queen as 'splendid and delightful'), which was hung opposite their desks in her sitting room.[xxi]27

  She was delighted by the lovely grounds which the Prince had planned and drained, levelled and planted; the avenue of cedars leading to the main entrance like the approach to a Tuscan villa, the model farms, the children's garden plots. She loved it all the more because Albert liked it so.[xxii] It did her heart good, she said, to see how he enjoyed it all. He was so full of enthusiasm for the place and for 'all the plans and improvements' he meant to carry out. He was 'hardly to be got at home for a moment'. For the rest of her life she recalled with pleasure standing on the balcony outside her sitting room on summer evenings listening to the hiss and patter of the fountains and the song of the nightingales in imitation of which Albert used to whistle so well on their walks together through the woods. 'Never do I enjoy myself more or more peacefully,' she wrote, 'than when I can be so much with my beloved Albert - follow him everywhere.'28

  Chapter 21

  TRAVELLING

  'Her Majesty travels at the rate of forty miles an hour.'

  It was the opportunity of being so much with Prince Albert that made her travels with him so enjoyable for the Queen. At Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace he was so preoccupied with work that there were days when he seemed to have no time to spare for her. 'I have a great deal to do,' he had complained to his brother in November 1840, 'and hardly ever get out into the open air'; while, some two and a half years later, Stockmar described him as 'well and contented', but 'pale, fatigued and exhausted'. When he was away from the cares and the duties he imposed upon himself, however, the Queen could enjoy more of his company and attention and have him to herself for hours on end.

  In the summer of 1843, four months after the birth of their third child, Princess Alice, the Queen and Prince Albert had gone abroad together for the first time. They had been invited to France by Louis-Philippe, King of the French, whose Foreign Minister and dominant figure in his Government was Francois Guizot, formerly French Ambassador in London and a warm advocate of closer Franco-British relations. Not only was it the first time the Queen had been abroad, it was the first time that any English sovereign had visited a French monarch since 1520 when Henry VIII met Francois I at the 'Field of the Cloth of Gold'.

  The Queen and Prince sailed from England on 25 August in the royal yacht, the Victoria and Albert, which had been launched earlier that year and was commanded by one of King William IV's bastards, Lord Adolphus FitzClarence. The Prince, as usual, was dreadfully seasick; but the Queen relished the voyage. 'The sailor-gypsy life' at sea, she thought, was 'very delightful'. She enjoyed her breakfast with the King's son, the Prince de Joinville, who came aboard off the French coast. Despite his deafness, she found him 'an amiable, agreeable companion', 'amusing and full of anecdotes'. 'The good, kind' King was very pleasant, too. He was standing up in his barge, she said, as the royal yacht approached Le Treport and was so impatient to greet his visitors that 'it was very difficult to prevent his getting out of the boat before it was close enough. Then he came up as quickly as possible and warmly embraced me.' Assuring her repeatedly how delighted he was to see her, he helped her into the barge which was rowed ashore with the 'Royal Standards of England and France floating side by side over the two sovereigns' heads'. On the shore large crowds welcomed the Queen with shouts of 'Vive la Reine d'Angleterre.'1

  'We then,' the Queen recorded, 'got into a curious old carriage, a sort of char a banc with a top to it in which we sat with the King and Queen [ Marie-Amelie, daughter of Ferdinand, King of the Two Sicilies] and all the ladies of the family', including the Princess of Joinville, the Duchess of Orleans, and Louis-Philippe's daughter, Louise, Queen of the Belgians.2

  It was a most uncomfortable journey to the King's residence, the Chateau d'Eu. Charlotte Canning, the Queen's lady-in-waiting, described the coach as 'a mixture between one of Louis XIV's time and a marketing cart from Hampton Court'. The driver almost overturned the unwieldy contraption as he was endeavouring to negotiate a gateway, and the passengers, in Lady Canning's words, were 'taken for some miles along a very narrow field road, in deep dust and over stones, and ruts and holes'.

  Nor, when at last they arrived, did Lady Canning much enjoy her stay at Eu. Admittedly the dinner on the first evening, served at the early hour of seven o'clock, was excellent, but it was served oddly. The Queen, wearing what Lady Canning thought a most unsuitable dress of scarlet crepe de chine trimmed round the bottom with three rows of lace, did not know what to do with the 'great French loaf which was placed beside her on an untidy table with 'everybody's bread and crumbs and dirt' remaining on the cloth 'all through the dessert'.

  The evening in general, like subsequent evenings, was 'dullish'. The French ladies were 'all rather tiresome' as well as 'dowdy'; while having to listen to Lord Liverpool, who accompanied the visitors from England as Lord Steward of the Household, talking incessantly 'in disagreeable French', was tedious beyond measure. After dinner one evening, in the middle of a performance by a man playing the French horn in a most eccentric manner, the King's son, the Duke of Montpensier, 'had the giggles and it caught from one person to another till all were in tears and the poor performer's sounds became stranger and stranger'. 'I kept grave very long indeed,' Lady Canning said, 'but my lips shook and some very deep notes vanquished me at last. I am very sorry for the poor man, but his back was partly turned and I hope he did not find out, and between each spasm every good-natured person called out "C'est etonnant! Merveilleux!"'

  Whether or not Queen Victoria joined in the general merriment, Lady Canning did not say; but she did record the fact that a band of fifty men played under Her Majesty's window and 'almost deafened her'.3

  For her part, however, the Queen enjoyed herself greatly. She felt as though it were a dream that she was at Eu, her 'favourite castle in the air of so many years', a fine chateau begun by Henry of Guise in 1578, enlarged by Mademoiselle de Montpensier in the seventeenth century and restored by Louis-Philippe. She got on very well with Queen Marie-Amelie with whom she was 'very merry and laughed a good deal'. Indeed, the whole French royal family was delightful: she felt 'so at home with them all', as though she were 'one of them'. It was so pleasant to be in 'a family circle with persons of [her] own rank with whom [she] could be on terms of equality & familiarity'. She felt 'so gay and happy with these dear people' and was, in Lady Canning's words, 'as amused as a child could be'. When she was obliged to leave Eu she did so 'with very g
reat regret', recalling with pleasure the clear blue skies of Normandy, the meals al fresco or in large tents, the kind attentions of Louis-Philippe, who had English beer and English cheeses specially imported for his English guests, the sight of Albert swimming in the sea.4

  Albert, also, had been charmed by his hosts. He did not much care for French people generally; but these, he told Stockmar, 'received us with a heartiness, I might say affection, which was quite touching'.5

  Before setting out for France the Queen had been advised by the Prime Minister to take care that the visit did not 'get mixed, either in reality or in appearance, with polities', while the French King's daughter gave similar advice to her mother: 'My excellent father should be natural, patriarchal, without ceremony, as he is always,' Queen Louise had advised. 'But unless she begins the subject, which she certainly will not ... he should not enter into politics and avoid everything which could suggest he was trying to influence her.'6

  The Queen was thankful that this advice had been followed, that, according to an official report, 'no exchange of views on political subjects took place', and the visit had gone off without any political differences to disturb the happy atmosphere.

  Having returned to spend a few days with her children at Brighton, she and Prince Albert returned to the Continent in the royal yacht to stay with King Leopold. Prince Albert was seasick once more as a matter of course; but the Queen was unaffected by the choppy waters of the Channel and she could not help laughing, so Lady Canning reported, at the sight of Prince Albert, followed by Lord Liverpool, then Lord Aberdeen, the Foreign Secretary, 'all vanishing in haste'.7

  Once again, Lady Canning did not enjoy herself during the few days the royal party spent in Belgium. To the Queen, on the other hand, they were a delight. It was 'such a joy' for her to be 'once again under the roof of one who [had] ever been a father to [her]'. She was taken to Bruges, and Ghent, Brussels and Antwerp; and everywhere she was met with 'cordiality and friendliness', even though her clothes came in for what Lady Canning considered to be well-deserved criticism. The bonnet she wore at Ghent 'would do for an old woman of seventy and her pink petticoat was longer than her muslin gown'.8 In Brussels, Charlotte Bronte, then studying French at M. and Mme Heger's school in the rue d'Isabelle, described her as 'very plainly dressed' as she drove through the streets, a 'little, stout, vivacious lady' of twenty-three.9