QUEEN VICTORIA A Personal History

by Christopher Hibbert

  Demanding as she was - thinking nothing of taking the maids-of-honour out driving on the bitterest of days and, not feeling the cold herself, oblivious to her companions' shivering - the older the Queen grew the more securely she commanded the affection as well as the respect of her ladies, for, inconsiderate as she so often was, she was also capable of great kindness and understanding sympathy. In the same contradictory way, she was alternately almost painfully honest and capable of the most devious machinations, prudish and tolerant, hard-headed and sentimental, artless and acute, combining sound common sense with outlandish prejudices, real and pretended.

  While frequently expressing her wish to fight alongside her brave soldiers and her pleasure when women succeeded in what were supposed to be male preserves, she was firmly opposed to their entering the professions, particularly the medical profession - the prospect of young girls and men entering the dissecting room together was an 'awful idea'.10 The campaign for women's suffrage was a 'mad wicked folly': Lady Amberley who supported it 'ought to get a good whipping'.11 Education 'ruined the health of the higher classes uselessly' and rendered the 'working classes unfitted for good servants and labourers'.12

  She was 'Coburgized from head to foot' and took 'the part of foolish foreign royalties with extraordinary zeal'. Yet, if on many occasions she was absurdly prejudiced and unreasonable, she was essentially, as Henry Ponsonby recognized, a woman of good sense. She was obstinate but rarely obtuse. When far cleverer people were wrong, she was often instinctively right. As Lord Salisbury observed, she had a deeper understanding of the passing moods of her people than many politicians who spent far more time among them than she did.13 Both Lord Salisbury, her last Prime Minister, and Henry Ponsonby recognized that in dealing with her one had not only to take advantage of her mercurial moods, as well as what she felt to be the state of her health, but also to try to understand her complex and contradictory character.

  Chapter 47

  SECRETARIES AND MINISTERS

  'People were taken by surprise by the sheer force of her personality.'

  Among the many rules which the Household were required to observe was an edict that there must be no smoking in any room which the Queen might enter, or, indeed, in the grounds of any of her residences, though she herself had been seen at a summer picnic lighting a cigarette and 'puffing very delicately' to keep midges away.1

  Nor were her secretaries allowed to smoke when handling papers she might have to touch. Before she was persuaded - apparently by John Brown - that a little tobacco smoke was 'no bad thing to have about the hoose', cards were framed and hung upon the walls of the royal residences calling attention to the prohibition against smoking; and visitors to Windsor waited until the Queen went to bed and they could go along to the billiard room, the only place in the Castle where smoking was tolerated.2 But the atmosphere in the billiard room was scarcely more relaxed than it was in the drawing room, particularly when the Queen's second son Prince Alfred was there, since the Duke was a most loquacious and boring talker. 'The Duke of Edinburgh occupies the chair and talks about himself by the hour,' Henry Ponsonby told his wife. 'Those who go [to the billiard room] are quite exhausted. Prince Henry [of Battenberg] has given up smoking in consequence.'3

  Once Count Hatzfeldt, who could not make the effort for the long journey to the billiard room, yet 'could not live without a cigar', was reduced to lying on his bedroom floor and blowing the smoke up the chimney.4 The King of Saxony was less discreet and profoundly shocked the Court by having the audacity to walk up the grand staircase with a cigar in his mouth.5 Courtiers who smoked secretly took to carrying peppermints in their pockets, for there was no telling when a summons to the Queen might come; and even to be in church was no excuse for being late in answering it.6

  Much as her ladies grew fond of her, she undoubtedly became an increasingly difficult, capricious and demanding employer as the years passed, frequently cross when, having sought advice, the counsel offered did not coincide with her own wishes. Disliking interviews in which her opinions, requests or orders might be called into question, she required that all matters, even those of a most trivial nature, should be committed to paper. Her private secretaries accordingly had an enormous amount of paperwork to get through every day, some of it of the utmost importance to the successful conduct of the Government's affairs, much else of no importance at all, each particular point for her consideration having to be submitted on a separate sheet.

  There were requests for her to accept books, to grant permission to copy pictures, to approve the details of Court functions, to confirm appointments and dismissals, to give her assent to Government policy, to select the names of clergymen suitable as preachers at Osborne, to decree the punishment to be inflicted upon a drunken footman at Windsor. There was one exchange of memoranda, which lasted for weeks, about the installation of a lift at Buckingham Palace; there was another, which continued for even longer, about the rights and duties of the Queen's band. The Queen's replies to Henry Ponsonby's submissions came back either in the form of terse minutes at the foot of the document concerned or in letters, written hurriedly and sometimes indecipherably. One of the Queen's letters, in which she complained of the 'atrocious & disgraceful writing' of a young nobleman in the Colonial Office, took Ponsonby a quarter of an hour to get through. But at least, when they had at length been deciphered, her decisions were concise and definite. For example, Sir Frederick Leighton, President of the Royal Academy, asked permission to have a copy taken of a portrait of the Queen by Sir Martin Archer Shee. The Queen's refusal ran: 'It is a monstrous thing no more like me than anything in the world.' Another artist asked leave to engrave one of the pictures he had painted for her: 'Certainly not. They are not good and he is very pushing.' A lady wrote to ask if her daughter might be granted permission to gain material for an article on the Royal Mews: 'This is a dreadful and dangerous woman. She better take the facts from the other papers.' Oscar Wilde sought leave 'to copy some of the poetry written by the Queen when younger': 'Really what will people not say & invent. Never cd. the Queen in her whole life write one line of poetry serious or comic or make a Rhyme even. This is therefore all invention & a myth.'[li] Would the Queen graciously assent to the new medical school at Edinburgh being named after her? 'Yes, on one condition viz: that no rooms for vivisection are included in it.'[lii]

  So, day after day, the ebb and flow of paper ceaselessly continued: Canon Dalton must not repeat grace in Latin. It was a mistake to say the chaplain at Hampton Court had given satisfaction; he never did so and was 'most interfering and disagreeable'. Neither the Dean of Westminster nor the Dean of Christ Church was to be allowed to preach at Osborne; the sermons of the first were far too long and those of the second like lectures. With infinite care and patience Ponsonby transmitted the Queen's instructions, tactfully altering the wording so as to give the least offence, writing all the letters himself, for up till 1878 he had no assistant.7

  Reading and answering letters occupied a large part of the Queen's secretaries' time abroad as well as at home, though many of those received on the Continent - such as one offering for sale a red, white and blue cat, and another addressed to 'Madam and dear Mother', asking her 'to give a little thought' to the son whom she had 'abandoned in India' -were not deemed worthy of reply.8

  The paperwork, burdensome as it was, constituted the least tiresome of Ponsonby's duties. He was constantly importuned by seekers after honours and titles, many of whose shameless petitions he did not trouble to pass on to the Queen. He was also constantly being called upon to take up the grievances and pass on the complaints of the numerous minor royalties who 'hovered at a distance round the Court', as well as to settle quarrels and to pacify the ruffled feelings of those within the Household who had been affronted either by their colleagues or rivals, or, as was often the case, by the Queen's lack of consideration. One such complainant was the Marchioness of Ely, a lady of the bedchamber, a timid, nervous and perpetually flustered widow sufferi
ng from some form of speech defect which compelled her to convey messages from the Queen in a kind of 'mysterious whispering' which Ponsonby did not always 'strain his ears to hear'. Her complaints - made to Sir Thomas Biddulph, Master of the Household, who passed them on to Ponsonby - were that the demands of the Queen were 'killing her' and that Her Majesty had refused permission for Lady Ely's son to go to see her. She was, however, reluctant to make a fuss. 'Perhaps,' she said, 'the Queen would not like it.' 'It shows,' Biddulph reported to Ponsonby, 'her absurd fear of the Queen.'9

  Ponsonby's services were required not only as a mediator between the Queen and her family and intimidated ladies but also in the settlement of disputes occasioned either by the huffiness of the German Secretary, Hermann Sahl - who was frequently so put out by some real or imagined slight that he refused to come down to meals - or by the squabbles of the Household doctors, often provoked by Sir William Jenner, a Tory of the most extreme kind, much given to outbursts of wild invective against Gladstone's Government which may well have been approved by the Queen but which seemed outrageous to Ponsonby. 'He is good at repartee and roars at his success,' Ponsonby told his wife after one particularly rowdy dinner at Osborne. 'He roundly abused Carlingford [Gladstone's Lord Privy Seal] and Lord Cairns [the former Lord Chancellor who was very deaf] because they could not understand him. I refuted an argument of his which he said he did not use. "Why," I exclaimed, "you said so just now." His eyes disappeared and in a calm voice he said, "I strongly advise you to consult an aurist, the first aurist in London, there is something extraordinarily wrong about your ears."'10

  Ponsonby was fond of Jenner, however, despite his loud cantanker-ousness and reactionary views. He also liked James Reid who, on his first arrival at Court, was informed that he could not, as an ordinary doctor, dine with the gentlemen of the Household as this would be a breach of the Queen's instructions for the social acceptance of members of his profession. Not at all put out by this, Reid began to give dinners of his own to which many members of the Household preferred to go rather than to endure the dullness and constraints of their own dining room.11

  It was to men like Reid that Ponsonby turned for relief from the appalling dullness of court life. This dullness was never more oppressive than it was at Balmoral, to which the Queen remained devoted because of its association with her happy married days and which her Ministers abhorred, not only because they wasted so much of their time travelling there when they were required to attend upon the Queen, but also because they were so uncomfortable when they did get there.

  Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, who was there one winter as minister-in-attendance when the snow was thick on the ground, reported to his wife:

  It is the funniest life conceivable: like a convent. We meet at meals, breakfast 9.45, lunch 2, dinner 9: and when we have finished each is off to his cell ... In this weather, I spend the whole day reading alone in my room ... The Castle ... carpeted & curtained in tartan ... is all intersected by long, narrow passages, ending in baize doors and I could not find my way ... It has been a perfectly dreadful day. Snowing ever since 10 a.m.... I drove to church at Crathie ... My companions envied me my nice fur coat...

  The amusing thing is the way [the Household] lament the dullness. Certainly the actual dinner is triste enough, every one half whispering to their neighbour ... They are all so sick of each other they jump at a stranger.12

  There were compensations, though: he 'got on very well' with both Princess Louise and Princess Beatrice. It was 'really a different thing' when Princess Louise was of the company; while Sir Henry Ponsonby was 'a perfect brick - so natural & unaffected through it all: he makes it endurable'. He was a fund of amusing stories. He told Campbell-Bannerman one of Mrs Gladstone writing a letter: 'Dear Lord Borthwick, will you let my son fish in your waters at Invercauld?' and receiving the reply, 'Dear Mrs Gladstone, I am not a Lord, I do not live at Invercauld, & I have no fish.'

  The Queen, so Campbell-Bannerman heard, was 'always either very serious or all smiles'. When summoned to dine at her table one evening, he himself was 'quite fatigued' by 'a long & very animated conversation with her' while a band - 'quite charming', 'so beautiful', in her opinion - played in the corridor outside. At a subsequent dinner, 'rather a more degage party altogether than usual', the Queen was 'very merry over some old Aunts of hers who when she was a girl used old-fashioned pronunciations - obleege, goold for gold, ooman for woman, ospital for hospital etc. etc.'[liii]13

  Life at Balmoral would not have been so tedious for members of the Household had they been allowed more freedom. But everything to do with the running of their lives was under the Queen's own strict control. She decided the precise time of their arrival and departure; she directed that they must never leave the house until she herself had gone out; when they did go out they must use only those particular ponies which, divided into five categories, were allocated to their use. Maids-of-honour must not talk to the gentlemen unless accompanied by a chaperone; on Sundays everyone had to go to church.

  Demanding and difficult as she could be there were few members of her Household who were not eventually captivated by her capricious charm, the delightful smile which transformed the severity of the grumpy expression caught in the photographs of her that she so liked to have taken. The Dean of Windsor, Randall Davidson, attempted to define this charm:

  I think it was the combination of absolute truthfulness and simplicity with the instinctive recognition and quiet assertion of her position of Queen ... I have known many prominent people but with hardly one of them was it found by all and sundry so easy to speak freely and frankly ... I have sometimes wondered whether the same combination of qualities would have been effective in a person of stately or splendid appearance. May it have been that the very lack of those physical advantages, when combined with her undeniable dignity of word and movement, produced what was in itself a sort of charm? People were taken by surprise by the sheer force of her personality. It may seem strange, but it is true that as a woman she was both shy and humble ... But as Queen she was neither shy nor humble, and asserted her position unhesitatingly.14

  Chapter 48

  REGINA ET IMPERATRIX

  'Oh! that Englishmen were now what they were!! But we shall assert our rights - our position - & "Britons never will be slaves" will be our Motto.'

  On 24 May 1874 Queen Victoria celebrated her fifty-fifth birthday. Three months previously she had been delighted when, in the general election of that year, the Conservatives were returned to power with their first clear majority over the Liberals since 1841 and Mr Gladstone, protesting that he 'deeply desired' what he called 'an interval between Parliament and the grave', decided to retire.

  Released from the oppressive presence of the 'old hypocrite' and basking once more in the affectionate flattery of Disraeli, the Queen began to take a far more enthusiastic interest in public affairs than she had ever done before in her life and allowed herself to be persuaded by cajoling encouragement, sometimes with the support of John Brown, to do things no one else could have induced her to do. 'Disraeli has got the length of her foot exactly,' commented Henry Ponsonby. 'He seems to me always to speak in a burlesque ... with his tongue in his cheek ... He communicates ... boundless professions of love and loyalty. He is most clever ... In fact, I think him cleverer than Gladstone. '1

  The Queen was well aware of the wiles and coaxing blandishments which Disraeli used in his attempt to impose his will upon her. 'He had a way when we differed,' she told Lord Rosebery wistfully after Disraeli's death, 'of saying, "Dear Madam" so persuasively', as he put his head on one side, his ringlets, dyed a deep black, falling over his temples.2

  Persuasive as he was, however, he could not always get his way with her; and on occasions she contrived to get her own way with him. She did so, for example, with the Public Worship Regulation Bill which Disraeli would have liked to dispense with but which the Queen insisted was a necessary corrective to the extreme ritualists who were introducing papist pra
ctices into the Church of England. She also had her way over the Royal Titles Act which gave the Queen the right to style herself Empress of India at a politically inconvenient time. She had long wanted this imperial title which so many sovereigns like the King of Prussia had acquired and which enabled those who held it - as it enabled the Emperor of Russia whose designs in the Far East were notorious - to arrogate to themselves and their children dignities and precedence which she felt demeaning to herself and her own. 'I am an Empress,' she had announced one day in 1873 when she was certainly not, '& in common conversation am sometimes called Empress of India.' Why then, she wanted to know, had she never 'officially assumed this title?' She felt she ought to do so and desired to have 'preliminary enquiries made'.3

  Disraeli, though he had no objection to the idea itself, did object to the introduction of the Bill at a time when the Liberal press would be able to make the most of the widespread opposition to it. But he did not want to disappoint 'the Faery'; and so he instructed the Lord Chancellor to put the announcement into the Queen's speech just after the paragraph referring to a forthcoming visit which the Prince of Wales was to make to India. 'What might have been looked upon as an ebullition of individual vanity' would then 'bear the semblance of deep and organised policy'.