QUEEN VICTORIA A Personal History

by Christopher Hibbert

  Little and stout though she was, she might at least, Charlotte Canning thought, have made some sort of effort to appear more elegant. Lady Canning had looked through her dresses while waiting for her in her cabin in the ship sailing for Ostend. 'They are decidedly very badly chosen,' she had thought, 'and quite unlike what she ought to have. Her dresser never ceased sighing and lifting up her hands and eyes all the time I looked at them and lamenting how little she cared about her dress.'[xxiii]10 Some of her clothing, indeed, was bought at Caley's, the drapers in Windsor High Street. One black silk dress was described by Lady Wolseley as being made 'anyhow and nohow'.11

  The Queen enjoyed staying in country houses in England with Prince Albert as much as she did travelling with him on the Continent. She asked for lists of proposed fellow-guests to be submitted to her; but she very rarely objected to a name. She was not always a welcome guest, however: when she paid a short visit to the Duke of Wellington at Walmer Castle with the intention of giving her children a taste of the bracing air of the Kentish coast after an outbreak of scarlet fever had prevented them going to Brighton, the Duke complained that he had had to 'pull the building to pieces' to suit her convenience and that when she arrived late - her carriage having got stuck in the Castle entrance - the place was a scene of the most utter confusion with trunks and baggage in every room and 'Abigails, Maids, Nurses of all ages and descriptions running about'.12 The visit, however, was a success, even though the wind howled through the rattling windows. The Queen, so she claimed, formed quite an affection for the place.[xxiv] A subsequent visit by the Queen and Prince Albert to the Duke's country house in Hampshire, Stratfield Saye, was also a success. There were only nine guest bedrooms in the house and the reception rooms were by no means large. The Duke had protested that the house was quite inadequate to receive Her Majesty. But she 'smiled and continued to be very gracious but did not give a hint of postponing the Visit'. So 'bells had to be hung from H.M. Apartments into those for Her attendants, Walls broken through, etc.'. 'You recollect Poor Mrs Apostles the Housekeeper,' the Duke reported to Lady Wilton, 'I thought that she would have burst out crying while I was talking to Her of the Honour intended and the preparations to be made. She said to me, "My Lord, Your House is a very comfortable Residence for yourself, your family and your friends. But it is not fit for the reception of the Sovereign and her Court." I answered, "Very true."13

  The Duke proved himself to be a most attentive host, showing the Queen to her room and returning to escort her down to dinner, where he amused her by helping her to the dishes himself, 'rather funnily giving such large portions & mixing up tarts and puddings, but being so kind and attentive about it'.14 After dinner he sat near to the Queen on the sofa where the conversation was 'certainly rather to the benefit of the whole society'. But he was 'very well and in very good spirits', she told her mother; and he went upstairs before her 'in the eveg: with two candles in his hand'.15

  She had a 'nice little sitting room', a 'snug bedroom', and she and Albert both had dressing rooms. If she was to be critical, she had to confess that the Duke's central heating system made the rooms too hot. The Duke might have known that she would have found them so, her objection to warm rooms being well known: he confided in Lady Salisbury, he was 'never warm at Windsor, excepting in bed! '16

  The Duke took Albert shooting and into the tennis court and the billiard room. Family prayers were said in the morning which had never been done before; and when, 'thank God!', the visit was concluded, the Duke attended 'Her Majesty on Horseback to the Borders of the County'.17

  Some two years before this, in 1843, the Queen and Prince Albert had gone by train to stay at Drayton Manor near Tamworth, Staffordshire, a house in the Elizabethan style which Sir Robert Smirke had designed for Sir Robert Peel in the early 1830s.[xxv]

  Still travelling by train, they went on to Chatsworth where the Duke of Devonshire, so Charles Greville said, 'would have willingly dispensed with her visit'. Nevertheless, 'all the people who have been at the Royal progress,' Greville continued, 'say there never was anything so grand as Chatsworth ... The Duke treats the Queen right royally. He met her at the station and brought her in his own coach and six, with coach and four following, and eight outriders. The finest sight was the illumination of the garden and the fountains; and after seeing the whole place covered with innumerable lamps and all the material of the illuminations, the Guests were astonished and delighted when they got up the following morning not to find a vestige of them left, and the whole garden as trim and neat as if nothing had occurred. '18

  The Queen knew the house well, having been to stay there as a girl as well as during the elections of 1841, but on this later occasion there was something new and remarkable to see apart from the illuminations. This was a huge conservatory, 'the most stupendous and extraordinary creation imaginable', in the Queen's own words.19 Over sixty feet high and nearly three hundred feet long, 'the whole entirely of glass', it had been designed by the remarkable man who had organized the illuminations, Joseph Paxton, a farmer's son, appointed superintendent of the gardens at Chatsworth in 1826 by the Duke who was himself President of the Horticultural Society of London.

  From Chatsworth, where, so the Queen said, she would have liked to stay on for another day, the royal party went on to Belvoir Castle in Leicestershire which had not long since been restored for the fifth Duke of Rutland after a fire.

  The Duke had arranged a day's fox hunting for the Prince and 'to the surprise of everybody', so Greville said, 'he acquitted himself in the field very creditably. He was supposed to be a very poor performer in this line, and as Englishmen love manliness and dexterity in field sports, it will have raised him considerably in publick estimation to have rode well after the hounds in Leicestershire.'20

  The Queen was much put out that the Prince's dash and skill should have created such a stir. 'One can hardly credit the absurdity of people here, but Albert's riding so boldly and hard has made such a sensation that it has been written all over the country, and they make much more of it than if he had done some great act! It rather disgusts one, but still it has done, and does good, for it has put an end to all impertinent sneering for the future about Albert's riding.'21

  The Queen would also have been annoyed had she known about the stories that were circulating in society about the possible reasons for her travelling about so much in England and abroad, rumours that she might have inherited a form of the mental disturbance which had afflicted her grandfather, George III. Charles Greville 'heard a whisper ... that the Queen had been in a restless state - always wanting to go somewhere and do something, and that it was thought advisable to let the excitement find a vent in these excursions. It is certainly remarkable that from the time Parliament broke up till now [December 1843] she has been, with only short intervals, in a constant state of locomotion, first in France, then in Belgium, then at Cambridge [where they stayed in the Master's Lodge at Trinity College and the Prince received the honorary degree of Doctor of Civil Law][xxvi] and now these recent visits.'22 At the beginning of 1844 Greville heard that it was 'reported in the City that the Queen's mind [was] not in a right state ... slight appearances [indicated] restlessness, excitement, nervousness'.23

  The travelling could not be resumed in 1844, first because of one of those frequent occurences of family mourning and then because of the Queen's pregnancy with her fourth child, Prince Alfred, 'Affie', who was born on 6 August. But in the summer of 1845 the Queen and her husband were free to go abroad again, this time once more to Belgium to see King Leopold and Queen Louise, then on to Bonn, where the Prince showed the Queen the small house where he had lodged as a student, then to the palace of the King of Prussia where the Queen was extremely annoyed, and made no attempt to disguise her annoyance, that her husband was not given the precedence she considered was due to him, the Archduke Frederick of Austria, an uncle of the Emperor, being placed above Prince Albert at a banquet at the Prussian Court. For days after this slight, so it was rep
orted at home, the Queen remained grumpy. 'We hear of nothing but the dissatisfaction which the Q. gave in Germany,' Charles Greville recorded, 'of her want of civility and graciousness, and a great many stories are told which are probably exaggerated or untrue. It is clear, however, that the general impression was not favourable.'24

  Once they had crossed over the border into Coburg, however, the Queen's annoyance was forgotten in her pleasure at the reception she and the Prince were accorded by the crowds that lined their route to the town, this 'dear old place' as the Queen called it, as though it had been her childhood home as well as her husband's. 'If I were not who I am,' she wrote the next day after a visit to Albert's birthplace, the Rosenau, 'this would have been my real home, but I shall always consider it my second one.' She climbed the stairs to the small bedrooms which had been Albert's and his brother, Ernest's. The view was beautiful; the wallpaper, she noted, with her eye for such details, was 'still full of holes from their fencing'.25

  Regrettably their German hosts, in an effort to entertain their visitors, laid on a grand battue in the Thuringen Forest which Lady Canning described with strong distaste:

  Three hundred men had been employed beating the woods for ten days to drive the deer [into a canvas enclosure] ... The shooters were stationed in different little turf forts, four or five guns together. Then a signal was given and an army of chasseurs instantly threw down the canvas wall ... Then everybody fired at the poor things who were driven in and out of the wood and up and down the hill till all were killed - it was a piteous sight, much the worse from the bad shooting, for most of the poor beasts were dreadfully wounded long before they were killed.26

  The Queen also condemned the battue which, she maintained, was 'hardly real sport', amounting to 'a kind of slaughter'. But what distressed her quite as much was the fact that Albert was condemned in England for having taken part in it. The prestige he had won for riding so well to hounds in Leicestershire was largely dissipated by his massacring deer in the Thuringer Wald.

  She herself was also much criticized at home.

  Nothing can exceed the universal indignation felt here by people of every description at the brutal and stupid massacre of the deer which Albert perpetrated and at which she assisted [commented Greville].[xxvii] It has been severely commented on in several of the papers, and met by a very clumsy (and false) attempt to persuade people that She was shocked and annoyed. No such thing appeared and nothing compelled her to see it. But the truth is [added Greville] her sensibilities are not acute, and though she is not at all ill-natured, perhaps the reverse, she is hard-hearted, selfish and self-willed.27

  Chapter 22

  BALMORAL

  'They live [at Balmoral] not merely like private gentlefolks, but like very small gentlefolks.'

  Soon after the Queen and Prince Albert moved into their new house at Osborne they considered the possibility of buying another retreat, farther from London and far more remote. They had first been to Scotland in 1842, sailing from Woolwich to Edinburgh in the Royal George and staying with the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry, one of her aides-de-camp and Captain-General of the Royal Company of Archers, at Dalkeith Palace, Midlothian, and then with the Marquess of Breadalbane, a future Lord Chamberlain of the Household, at Taymouth Castle in Perthshire. They were enchanted by all that they saw as they travelled to Loch Leven and Scone, Stirling Castle and Linlithgow, the Prince constantly reminded of the Coburg he loved and missed: even the people of the Highlands seemed to him to look like Germans.1

  'Scotland has made a most favourable impression upon us both,' he told his grandmother. 'The country is full of beauty ... perfect for sport of all kinds, and the air remarkably pure and light ... The people are more natural, and are marked by that honesty and sympathy, which always distinguish the inhabitants of mountainous countries, who live far away from towns. There is, moreover, no country where historical traditions are preserved with such fidelity ... Every spot is connected with some interesting historical fact, and with most of these Sir Walter Scott's accurate descriptions have made us familiar.'2

  Two years later, in the autumn of 1844, the Queen and Prince were back in Scotland as guests of Lord Glenlyon, shortly to succeed his uncle as sixth Duke of Atholl, at Blair Castle in Perthshire. Again they were enchanted by both countryside and people. The Queen was 'quite delighted' with Blair Atholl, Charlotte Canning said, and in such 'very high spirits, full of jokes and fun', while the Prince was 'in ecstacies'. 'We are all well,' he told the Dowager Duchess of Coburg, 'and live a somewhat primitive, yet romantic, mountain life, that acts as a tonic to the nerves, and gladdens the heart of a lover, like myself, of field-sports and of Nature.' Lady Canning disapproved of their going to a Church of Scotland service in the Kirk on Sunday when they might well have joined the 'poor little episcopal congregation'. This was also the view of the Morning Post which condemned the Queen for going to a service in the 'meeting-place of the Calvinists or Presbyterians, to whom Prelacy - the Prelacy Her Majesty has sworn to maintain - is the object of implacable hate and abhorrence'. But Prince Albert was perfectly satisfied with the Kirk, the service there being quite like what he had been used to in Germany.3

  'I can only say that the scenery is lovely,' the Queen wrote in her diary, 'grand, romantic, and a great peace and wilderness pervades all, which is sublime.' 'Blair itself and the houses in the village looked like little toys from the great height we were on,' she continued, having climbed the hill of Tulloch, guided by one of Lord Glenlyon's servants in his Highland dress. 'It was quite romantic. Here we were with only this Highlander behind us holding the ponies, not a house, not a creature near us, but the pretty Highland sheep with their horns and black faces.' 'It was really the most delightful, most romantic ride and walk' she had ever had. Indeed, the whole short holiday had been a delight and the Highlanders she had encountered were such 'chivalrous, fine, active people'. When she got home she found it difficult to reconcile herself to being at Windsor again as she pined for her 'dear, dear Highlands, the hills, the pure air, the quiet, the retirement, the liberty - all'.4

  Three years passed. Another child was born, the Queen's third daughter, Helena, to be known as 'Lenchen', on 25 May 1846. Then in the summer of 1847 the Queen was able to spend another holiday in Scotland to which she had so much been looking forward, this time as a guest of the second Marquess of Abercorn, Groom of the Stole to the Prince Consort, who lent the royal party a remote fishing lodge at Ardverikie on the shore of Loch Laggan, Inverness. Even though it poured with rain for much of the time, the Queen was again enchanted by Scotland and the Scottish people; and when they got home they decided they must have a place in the Highlands themselves.

  They were encouraged in this decision by Sir James Clark, still the Queen's Physician-in-Ordinary, who had been born at Cullen in Banffshire and who, as author of 'The Influence of Climate in the Prevention and Cure of Chronic Diseases' and of a 'Treatise on Pulmonary Consumption', entertained a high opinion of the curative and prophylactic effects of pure fresh air, Highland air in particular. He was acquainted with Sir Robert Gordon who lived at Balmoral, a turreted castle of whitewashed granite with slit windows, a high-pitched roof and round towers with cone-shaped roofs. It stood not far from Ardverikie, where the air and climate were, in Sir James's opinion, particularly beneficial. Fortuitously, Sir Robert died suddenly over his breakfast table on 8 October 1847; and the Queen, pressed by Sir James Clark to do so, bought what remained of the lease from Sir Robert's brother, Lord Aberdeen, who had inherited it. She did so without having seen it but she was satisfied that it was presentable enough for their purpose by a set of watercolours commissioned from the Scottish landscape painter, James Giles, a friend of Lord Aberdeen.5

  Early the following year the Queen and Prince went to see Balmoral, 'a pretty little Castle in the old Scotch style', and were not disappointed. 'All seemed to breathe freedom and peace,' the Queen wrote, 'and to make one forget the world and its sad turmoils.' The pure air was 'm
ost refreshing', the soil 'delightfully dry', and all was 'so calm and so solitary', so reminiscent of the Thuringer Wald. It was 'wonderful not seeing a single human being, not hearing a sound excepting that of the wind, or the call of the blackcock or grouse'. And then the Highlanders were so intelligent and warm-hearted, so well bred, so polite without being in the least subservient.

  She and Albert, she felt sure, could both be very happy and healthy at Balmoral; and so they were. Charles Greville, who went there in September 1849 to attend a Council 'to order a Prayer for relief against the cholera', painted a picture of the most perfect contentment. Leaving on a Monday by the five o'clock train, he spent the first night at Crewe, the second at Perth and arrived at Balmoral at half past two on Wednesday afternoon just in time for the meeting.

  'I am glad to have made this expedition,' he wrote in his diary, 'and to have seen the Queen and Prince in their Highland retreat, where they certainly appear to great advantage. The place is very pretty, the house very small.' So small was it in fact that there were no sitting rooms for guests; and Ministers might well find themselves discussing state affairs with Her Majesty while she was sitting on the edge of their bed on which, as Lord Malmesbury discovered, they had to write their despatches, their secretaries being lodged three miles away. The billiard room had to serve also as a drawing room and the ladies had to keep moving about to dodge the players' cues.