Such was the majesty that surrounded Queen Victoria, that she was regarded almost as a divinity of whom even her own family stood in awe. However, to us children she was 'Gangan' ... She wore a white tulle cap, black satin dress and shiny black boots with elastic sides. What fascinated me most about 'Gangan' was her habit of taking breakfast in little revolving huts mounted on turntables so that they could be faced away from the wind. If the weather was fine, a small low-slung carriage ... would be at the front door. In this she would ride to one or other of the shelters where her Indian servants would be waiting with her wheel-chair. They would serve her breakfast, which always began with a bowl of steaming hot porridge. Later she would call for her Private Secretary and begin the business of the day.
My great-grandmother always seemed to be surrounded by members of her immense family. She had nine children, forty grandchildren, numerous great-grandchildren [she was survived by thirty-seven] and countless nephews, nieces, and cousins by marriage...
From the time I learned to walk, one of my strongest recollections of these visits to 'Gangan' was of my being pushed forward to say 'how do you do' to Uncle Ernie or Aunt Louischen. Their greeting would be affectionate, but more often than not the words, though in fluent English, would be pronounced in the guttural accents of their mother tongue.5
The Queen was particularly fond of this boy, David, a 'most attractive little boy, and so forward and clever'. 'He always tries at luncheon time to pull me up out of my chair,' she wrote in her journal, 'saying "Get up, Gangan", and then to one of the Indian servants, "Man pull it", which makes us laugh very much.' Even so, both he and his brother, Albert, the future King George VI, were both frightened of their great grandmother when she was in a less playful mood and then they would often burst into tears and this would annoy her and she would ask petulantly what she had done wrong.6
Compared with what Henry Ponsonby called the peremptory manner in which she had treated her children, the indulgence generally shown to her grandchildren and great-grandchildren was extraordinary. One of her eldest daughter's sons once released a pet crocodile under her writing desk, an antic which his mother and her siblings would never have dared to perpetrate. Other children were permitted to build walls round her feet with empty dispatch boxes; and they remembered going for rides with her in her carriage and reducing her and themselves to helpless laughter. Her granddaughter, Margaret, the Duke of Connaught's child, was particularly naughty but she was usually forgiven because she was so 'funny'. The Queen was also amused rather than cross when Princess Beatrice's Alexander, known as 'Drino', wrote to her from Wellington College to beg her to send him some more pocket money. This she declined to do, telling the boy that he must learn to keep within his allowance. He replied to say she need not bother about the matter any more as he had sold her letter of refusal for thirty shillings.7
The children were not allowed to go too far, however; and, once they were old enough to sense her regal authority, they felt a certain awe in approaching her, just as she felt shy in their presence until she grew accustomed to their company, occasionally giggling apprehensively, giving diffident little shrugs of her shoulders when asking them questions. The Duke of Edinburgh's daughter, Princess Marie, known as 'Missy', and one day to be Queen of Rumania, recalled the walk to her room down hushed corridors in which grown-ups spoke in whispers.[lxii] And then the Queen's door opened 'and there sat Grandmama not idol-like at all, not a bit frightening, smiling a kind smile [the 'sweetest, most entrancing smile' which the composer and feminist, Ethel Smyth, had 'ever seen'] almost as shy as us children.'
Like the Queen's other grandchildren, however, Princess Marie knew that her grandmother could be strict as well as kind and shy. Princess Beatrice's daughter, Princess Victoria Eugenie, known as Ena, the future Queen of Spain, was told to be quiet in church at the Duke of York's wedding: nobody, she was told, talked in church. When the Archbishop began to read the service, however, Princess Ena called out 'But, Mummy, that man is talking.' On returning to Buckingham Palace the Queen severely told the child not to be pert. She had reason to be cross on other occasions with Princess Ena whose memories of her grandmother were accordingly less fond than those of her cousins, though she spoke of her 'lovely girlish voice and silver laugh'.
She said [to Sir Harold Nicolson] that Queen Victoria never understood children and asked them so many questions that they became confused. She had a horrible bag of gold and coral out of which she would take sovereigns and give them to them. When it was too snowy at Balmoral to go out to Crathie Church, she would give them Bible talks in her room. That was a great ordeal, as she always lost her temper with their stupidity ... No liberties were permitted. The Battenberg children, being resident family, were always given dull nursery meals - beef, mutton and milk puddings - but visiting children were allowed eclairs and ices. Once Princess Ena, in indignation at this, said as her grace, 'Thank God for my dull dinner.' Queen Victoria was enraged at this and punished her.8
This, however, was a rare occurrence. She was seldom so cross with any of her grandchildren, most of whom she loved dearly. When Princess Ena was badly injured while riding her pony and Dr Reid felt obliged to tell her grandmother of the gravity of her case, the Queen said, 'I love these darling children so, almost as much as their parents.'
She took the greatest interest in their development and in that of all their many cousins; and it would have been too much to expect of her character that she should not require them to come to see her to subject them to cross-examination so as to elicit their qualities and attainments, as it would have been to expect that she should refrain from giving their parents advice about their upbringing and marriages. It was certainly predictable, for example, that she should tell the Princess of Wales that her sons should be kept 'apart from the society of fashionable and fast people', and advance the decided opinion that Princess Alice's daughter, Elizabeth, known as Ella, ought to be strongly discouraged from marrying the Grand Duke Serge, Tsar Alexander Ill's younger brother. She would never stand the climate for one thing; and, for another, Ella would be quite lost to her grandmother because, so the Queen said, 'Russia is our real enemy and totally antagonistic to England.'9
When her grandchildren were small the Queen delighted in arranging treats for them; and it became customary for her to give them all a gold watch on their tenth birthday.10 She would have performing bears and Punch and Judy men brought to Windsor and Osborne for them; and once Buffalo Bill and his troupe came to put on their show below the East Terrace at Windsor; another day a man with a barrel organ and a monkey was summoned to the quadrangle for Princess Ena; and 'the Queen was much amused when the monkey climbed the portico and tried to find a way into the Castle through the dining room windows'.11
Once they had succeeded in overcoming the Queen's shyness as well as their own, her grandchildren clearly enjoyed their visits to Windsor and the company of their grandmother, her odd comments and forthright, unpredictable views. 'Grandmama so kind and dear as usual,' Princess Victoria of Prussia told her mother, describing in her letters home the summer days, the green grass in the Park - 'no one knows what grass is until they come to England' - and the rhododendrons - 'like a dream' - the Queen making a speech, 'so well and without hesitation', as she presented new colours to a regiment in the courtyard, the drives to Frogmore and the picnic teas with the nurses in their long, rustling dresses running after children down the slopes, the Queen working so conscientiously at her papers in the shade of an immense cedar tree, the games of tennis on the courts below the East Terrace, the Eton boys rowing on the river in the evening and Uncle Bertie, charming and pleasingly raffish, coming to dinner and talking of a different world.12
Chapter 55
WOULD-BE ASSASSINS
'We shall have to hang some, & it should have been done before.'
As the Queen's carriage drove out of Windsor station yard on the late afternoon of 2 March 1882, she heard what she took to be an engine letting off steam. T
hen she saw people running about in all directions and a man being hustled away as two Eton boys hit him on the head and shoulders with their umbrellas. A superintendent of the Windsor police ran towards them and snatched a revolver from the man's hand. Brown was not as quick as usual in jumping down from his seat at the back of the carriage; and later the Queen described him as being 'greatly perturbed'.1
The would-be assassin, who was driven off in a cab to the police station by the superintendent, was, so the Queen was sorry to learn, a Scotsman. His name was Roderick Maclean and he fancied himself as a poet. When he was searched the police found an example of his work, dedicated to the Queen, together with a letter from Lady Biddulph, the Master of the Household's wife, informing him that Her Majesty did not accept manuscript poetry. It was also discovered that Maclean, after suffering a serious head injury, had spent fifteen years in a lunatic asylum from which he had not long since been discharged. At his trial on a charge of High Treason at Reading Assizes, his defence counsel maintained that no one could doubt that he was still insane. This contention was supported by several medical experts. The Queen, however, would have none of it; and when Maclean was found not guilty of attempting to murder Her Majesty 'on grounds of insanity', the verdict outraged her common sense. How, she protested, could the man be found not guilty of attempted murder when numerous witnesses had actually seen him attempt it? It that was the law, she said, the law must be changed. And so it was: the following year an Act was passed providing for the new formula, 'guilty but insane'. Meanwhile, the two Etonians who had belaboured Maclean with their umbrellas were both promised a commission in the Guards.2
This was by no means the first attempt which had been made on the Queen's life. Four months after her marriage, when she had been three months pregnant with the Princess Royal, she had been driving up Constitution Hill from Buckingham Palace in an open carriage with Prince Albert one evening on their way to see her mother, who had not long since moved to Belgrave Square. The carriage was suddenly brought to a halt by a loud bang. 'My God! Don't be alarmed!' exclaimed the Prince, throwing his arms around his wife who was so little alarmed that she laughed at his agitation. She then noticed 'a little man on the footpath with his arms folded over his breast, a pistol in each hand', looking 'so affected and theatrical' that the Prince, by his own account, was 'quite amused'. The Queen saw the man take aim for a second time before the Prince pushed her head down as a bullet flew over it. The man was seized by John William Millais, a gentleman from Jersey, whose eleven-year-old son, John Everett Millais, a pupil at Henry Sass's school of drawing in Bloomsbury, had just raised his cap to Her Majesty.3
Mr Millais had no trouble in holding the assailant until the Queen's attendants rushed towards them as a gathering crowd began to shout 'Kill him! Kill him!' The Queen, still outwardly calm though now much alarmed, was driven up the Hill. 'We arrived safely at Aunt Kent's,' the Prince recorded. 'From thence we took a short drive through the Park, partly to give Victoria a little air, and partly to show the public we had not ... lost all confidence in them.'4
The assailant, 'an impudent, horrid little vermin of a man', as Lord Melbourne described him, was a frail, rather simple-minded youth named Edward Oxford who lived in decrepit lodgings which were found to contain not only numerous bulletins issued by some revolutionary society, but also - so unfounded and improbable rumours had it - letters from Hanover, the monogram of whose King, E. R. (Ernestus Rex, the former Duke of Cumberland) had been found on the pistols which Oxford had fired in the attack. Oxford was arraigned on a charge of High Treason and was widely expected to be hanged; but, to the annoyance of both the Queen and of Lord Normanby, the Home Secretary, who could not believe that he was insane, as well as of Baroness Lehzen who observed that there was too much method in the man's madness, Oxford was sent to a lunatic asylum where he remained for twenty-seven years until given leave to emigrate after expressing his profound contrition. On being shown the pistols by Prince Albert the Queen reflected that they 'might have finished me off '.5 This possibility made the poet, Elizabeth Barrett, 'very angry'. 'What,' she asked indignantly, 'is this strange popular mania for Queen shooting?'6
The Queen was again nearly 'finished off two years later as her carriage was driven along the Mall where a man, described by Prince Albert as 'a little, swarthy, ill-looking rascal... of the age from twenty-six to thirty, with a shabby hat and of dirty appearance', pushed forward and, pointing a pistol at the Queen, pulled the trigger. The gun, however, was either not loaded or it misfired.
That evening the Prince talked to Sir Robert Peel; and, since the Queen felt sure that the man, who had managed to slink away in the crowd, would try again - and reluctant as she was to remain under threat in Buckingham Palace until he was apprehended - it was decided that she and the Prince should drive along the same route the next day. The coachman was told to drive rather faster than usual with 'two Equerries quite close to the carriage on either side'. An excuse was made to leave behind Lady Portman, the Queen's lady-in-waiting, who had been with her the previous day. 'I must expose the lives of my gentlemen,' the Queen said. 'But I will not those of my ladies.'7
As she and the Prince set off on the fine afternoon of 30 May 1842, their minds, as Prince Albert put it, were 'not very easy'. Numerous policemen in plain clothes were concealed around the Palace, behind the trees and in the Park. But as the carriage rolled along at a brisk pace in the sunlight, it seemed that their presence was unnecessary. On the return journey, however, the 'ill-looking rascal' was waiting, as the Queen expected. He pointed a pistol at her. She was close enough to him to hear the click of the hammer.
The man was seized, carried off, tried and condemned to death as a traitor, a sentence which so shocked and surprised the prisoner that he fainted in the dock. The Queen described it as being 'very painful' to her, but necessary as a deterrent. A plea of insanity had been advanced in court, but, as with Edward Oxford, she felt sure that this would-be assassin, John Francis, the son of a stage carpenter, was 'not the least mad' but 'very cunning'. She consequently heard with concern that his sentence was to be commuted to transportation for life on the grounds that there was some doubt as to whether or not the man's pistol had been loaded. She was, she said, 'glad, of course', that the man's life was to be spared; but she could not help feeling that hanging was a more effective deterrent than transportation, a view apparently shared by Edward Oxford himself who was said to have remarked to a warder that if he had been hanged 'there would have been no more shooting at the Queen'.8
As it was, only two days after Francis's reprieve the Queen was shot at yet again. This, however, appeared to be a not very serious attempt at assassination. The assailant was a miserable-looking midget, less than four feet tall, John William Bean, whose pistol contained far more tobacco and loose paper than gunpowder. He was sentenced to a mere eighteen months' imprisonment.
Nor was the next attack on the Queen a very serious matter. This took place on 19 May 1849 when an unemployed and unbalanced Irishman, William Hamilton, who had tried to manufacture a firearm with a few bits of wood and the spout of a tea kettle, eventually borrowed a pistol from his landlady with the intention of shooting at the Queen as she drove down Constitution Hill.9 Since Hamilton omitted loading the gun before pointing it at the Queen and was, in any case, clearly insane, there was again no question of hanging the man who was sentenced to seven years' transportation. After this, the fourth occasion upon which the Queen's life had been threatened since she had come to the throne, Lord Shaftesbury wrote in his diary, 'The profligate George IV passed through a life of selfishness and sin without a single proved attempt to take it. This mild and virtuous young woman has, four times already, been exposed to imminent peril.'10
Alarmed as she had been by Hamilton, the Queen was far more upset as well as injured and affronted the following year by 'a very inconceivable attack' in July while she was on her way to visit her uncle Adolphus who was gravely ill at Cambridge House. In the carriage
with her were Princess Alice, the Prince of Wales, Prince Alfred and one of the Queen's favourite ladies-in-waiting, Fanny Jocelyn. Her escort was a single equerry who became separated from the carriage as it squeezed through a narrow archway. On its emergence a pale, fair-haired young man whom the Queen had noticed before walking in the Park stepped forward from the crowd and hit the Queen a vicious blow over the head with the brass end of a stick which momentarily stunned her. The Prince of Wales, then nine years old, blushed a deep red; Fanny Jocelyn, having attended to the Queen, burst into tears; while the Queen herself struggled to her feet, calling out 'I am not hurt' to the people who were roughly manhandling her assailant, Robert Pate, a young, deranged, recently retired lieutenant in the 10th Hussars whose father had been High Sheriff of Cambridge. The Queen was deeply shocked.
Certainly it is very hard & very horrid that I, a woman - a defenceless young [thirty-one-year-old] woman & surrounded by my children should be exposed to insults of this kind, and be unable to go out quietly for a drive [she wrote in her journal]. For a man to strike any woman is most brutal, & I, as well as everyone else, thinks this far worse than any attempt to shoot, which wicked as it is, is at least more comprehensible & more courageous ... I own it makes me nervous out riding, and I stare at any person coming near the carriage.11
Lord Hardwicke, a lord-in-waiting, expressed the view, however, that the attack on the Queen was almost worthwhile because of the love it elicited afterwards. It was an opinion she herself had once expressed, claiming that it was worth going through the danger for the affection and sympathy which the people displayed towards her when she survived.
QUEEN VICTORIA A Personal History Page 47