QUEEN VICTORIA A Personal History

by Christopher Hibbert

  Our expedition to Milan was a failure. The Queen was annoyed because Paget [Sir Augustus Paget, the British Ambassador] wanted to telegraph about it. Her idea was that she should go quite incog ... driving about with the Highlander on the box ... Then it poured. I hinted at a postponement but she said no she would go. So we went. There was a crowd at the station but the people were kept back. At the Cenacola not many and a dozen police, but even here H. M. thought they were too close to the carriage.

  We saw the pictures in peace but in haste. At the Cathedral there was a crowd on the steps which increased inside ... This perturbed her and she complained to me that there were not more police. If she had gone as Queen we might have had fifty police there, but she had insisted over and over again that she would go quite privately...

  As it rained the Queen drove in a shut carriage. She wouldn't go to the Brera - so we drove for an hour. And she wouldn't have Paget in her carriage - and she didn't ask Lady Paget to come. So ... she saw nothing. We men opened our carriage as it had ceased raining and saw a great deal. I stopped the carriage once and ran back to tell her these were San Lorenzo's columns. But this stopping of the carriage was coldly received and a crowd began to assemble to see the Highlander, so we went on - and I didn't trouble them again. In the evening the Queen began to reflect that she had seen very little. True. But whose fault?18

  Insistent as she was about travelling incognito, she was perfectly content and was, indeed, pleased in her characteristically contradictory way, to be greeted with the by now familiar shouts of la Regina d'Inghilterra!' from children by the roadside as her carriage passed by with its escort of carabinieri along the shores of Lake Maggiore.

  As well as to Baveno and Lucerne the Queen went on holiday to Baden-Baden and Coburg, Darmstadt, Aix-les-Bains, and Mentone - where she stayed at the Chalet des Rosiers and the town was illuminated in her honour - to Charlottenburg, Biarritz, Hyeres, Cannes, Florence and Grasse.[lxiv]

  At Florence, which she visited in 1888, 1893 and 1894, she stayed first at the Villa Palmieri - which was lent her by the Countess of Crawford and Balcarres and was specially painted and decorated for her stay - then at the Villa Fabbricotti from which she was escorted on protracted rounds of sightseeing by her Indian servants, much to the astonishment of the Florentines who took them for princes from her empire in the east. Having spent several hours in 1888 being wheeled round the Uffizi, she passed sadly by the Casa Gherini where Prince Albert had stayed in 1838. She remembered how he had marvelled at the sculptures of Donatello, which were 'far more beautiful' than he had imagined, and how he had developed his taste for Italian primitives.

  The Queen also listened sadly to the music of the organ in the Badia which Prince Albert had played. He had played the piano, too; but this had not been a success, since the only instrument he had been able to hire in Florence was old and out of tune.

  One day during this same visit, an English boy, the Hon. George Peel, saw 'policemen clearing the way for a little carriage in the Piazza del Duomo'. 'In it was an old lady with a companion,' Peel told Sir Harold Nicolson over sixty years later. 'It was Queen Victoria. She stopped the carriage, fumbled in her corsage, and drew out a locket which she held up to the [recently restored] facade [of the Duomo].' 'The Lady-in-Waiting afterwards told Peel that it was a miniature of the Prince Consort. She thought it would interest him to see how the Duomo looked after being repaired.'19

  The Queen was tireless in her sightseeing in Florence which, so she said, 'I delight to do'. She went to the Palazzo Pitti and the Boboli Gardens, to Santa Croce and Santa Maria Novella, the Baptistery and the Bargello. The Crown Princess was 'quite wrong' to suppose she did not care for art and architecture, though she had in all honesty to concede she was no sightseer when it came to Greek and Roman remains. She spent hours in the Uffizi and was 'delighted with the treasures of art to be seen to such great advantage there'.20

  Sir Augustus Paget's German wife, Walpurga Hohenthal, provided a description of her getting into her carriage in Florence in 1893 as she set out upon one of these excursions:

  The Queen generally keeps her own carriage waiting for an hour. At last she came out, after an infinity of rugs, shawls, parasols and drawing material had preceded her. Carpeted steps were pushed near the carriage and a grey-headed Highlander on one side and a lemon-turbaned Indian on the other, lifted the old lady into the large landau. The stalwart Highlander closed the door of the carriage after the other ladies had got in, while the Indian with his delicate brown hands, pulled the Queen's gauze veil over her face. In her young and bell-like voice she then called out: 'To the Ponte Vecchio.' She was in black with a round white felt hat.21

  The Queen eagerly looked forward to these foreign holidays and she much enjoyed them, despite the amount of paperwork she had to attend to almost every day, John Brown's grumpiness, her constant regret that Albert was not there to share her pleasure with her and her admission that sightseeing tired her 'most dreadfully and finally bored [her] too'.22 She filled letters and the pages of her journal with accounts of her diversions and enjoyments. She wrote of her ascent of Mount Pilate and the awesome sight of the St Gotthard Gorge, the even steeper ascent to La Grande Chartreuse where she asked for a glass of the monks' celebrated liqueur and where she was much taken with 'a very good-looking and tall young English monk with a beautiful, saintly, almost rapt expression' who knelt before her and kissed her hand, the peaceful woods outside Hyeres where Henry Ponsonby saw her one morning, limping along with Lady Churchill, followed by her bath chair and her patient, white donkey, 'Jacquot which she had bought from a peasant farmer whom she had come across on the shores of the Lac du Bourget. She wrote, too, of the delights of the Chalet des Rosiers which was surrounded by olive groves and had a beautiful view of the sea, the comfort of the Maison Mottet, later renamed the Villa Victoria, at Aix-les-Bains, where the scenery was 'quite splendid' and where, so Henry Ponsonby recorded, 'she heard noises below her room and, not being sure whether it was the regular rumblings of an earthquake or what, she sent for Hyam, the footman-in-waiting, who had the audacity to say "I think it must be Sir Henry."' 'It is true,' Ponsonby added, 'I do live just under the Queen and it is true I went to bed early, but I don't believe it was my snoring. However, the anecdote has caused great hilarity in our circles, in which I do not join.'23

  The Queen also recalled with pleasure her excursion in 1889 from Biarritz into Spain, the first reigning English monarch to have been in that country, her drive through the streets of San Sebastian with the Queen Regent, Maria Christina, the cheering crowds, the black horses looking like animals in a painting by Velasquez, her reception by the officials of the municipality who did their best to make her feel at home by offering her a cup of tea which proved to be quite undrinkable. And she looked back with equal pleasure on her days staying at the Grand Hotel at Grasse in 1891 when, although seventy-two, she behaved as though she were seventeen, so Marie Mallet thought, looking as 'fresh as a daisy' going out for a two-hour drive, though the mistral was at its height, and coming back covered in dust, as 'white as a miller'.24

  In 1895 the Queen went to Cimiez and liked the place so much that she went back every year for the next four years, staying at first at the Grand, then at the Hotel Excelsior, renamed in her honour the Excelsior Regina, where the President of France, Felix Faure, who was staying at the Riviera Palace, came to pay his respects. Since her interpretation of the protocol to be observed on such a reception of a president precluded her greeting him as she would have done a sovereign, she called the Prince of Wales over from Cannes and had him receive her visitor downstairs and bring him up. 'The three Princesses and the ladies were at the top of the stairs,' she recorded. 'I stood at the door of the drawing-room and asked him to sit down. He was very courteous and amiable, with a charming manner, so grand seigneur and not at all parvenu [his father had been a furniture maker in a small way of business in Paris]. He avoided all politics, but said kindly how I was aimee par la population
, that he hoped I was comfortably lodged, etc.'[lxv]25

  When staying at Cimiez the Queen frequently drove over to Nice, that 'Paradise of nature', where she regularly attended the Battle of Flowers, delighting in pelting the floats and keeping footmen busy in supplying her with plenty of blossoms. It was at Cimiez that she spent her last foreign holiday; and she left it with deep regret. 'I shall mind returning to the sunless north,' she wrote in her journal. 'But I am so grateful for all I have enjoyed here.'26

  She had hoped to return to Cimiez the following year; but the increasingly outspoken attacks on her country in French newspapers had made another visit inadvisable while the Boer war was still being fought, so she decided to go to Ireland instead. It was 'entirely her own idea', she told the Empress Frederick, 'as was [her] giving up going abroad - and it will,' she added 'give gt pleasure & do good'.

  Over fifty years earlier, in 1849, she had gone to Ireland with her husband and four eldest children and she had been much impressed by the good looks of the women, even though so many of them were in rags. They were 'really very handsome - quite in the lowest class ... such beautiful black eyes and hair and such fine colour and teeth'. The crowds were 'noisy and excitable but very good-natured, running and pushing about, and laughing, talking, and shrieking' rather than cheering. She had landed at Cove which was renamed - but only temporarily renamed - Queenstown 'in honour of it being the first spot on which [she] set foot upon Irish ground'; and 'along the road to Dublin the masses of human beings', the bands, the 'waving of hats and handkerchiefs, the bursts of welcome which rent the air - all made it a never-to-be forgotten scene, when one reflected how lately the country had been in open revolt and under martial law' during the famine and the violence of the earlier 1840s which had led her to declare that, while their sufferings 'really were too terrible to think of, the Irish were 'a terrible people'.27 The more one did for them, 'the more unruly and ungrateful they seemed to be'.28 Prince George of Cambridge, who had been responsible for the military arrangements, confirmed that the Queen had been greeted with the utmost enthusiasm on this visit. It was, he had thought, 'impossible any longer to doubt that Irishmen are at heart thoroughly Royalistically inclined, if only the agitators would leave them in peace'.29

  The Queen had returned to Ireland in 1861, when the Prince of Wales was attached to the Grenadier Guards in the Curragh Camp near Dublin. But she had not been in Ireland since; and she felt the bravery of the Irish soldiers in South Africa deserved recognition by her visit and by the establishment of a new regiment, the Irish Guards. As in 1849, she was much touched by the warmth of her reception by the loyalists, knowing nothing of the boos and catcalls of the Republicans and the tearing down of Union Jacks in the broken windows of shops in Dublin. Her equerry, Henry Ponsonby's son, Frederick, was with her and recalled:

  There were crowds of people practically all the way, but when we got into Dublin the mass of people wedged together in the street and in every window, even on the roofs, was quite remarkable. Although I had seen many visits of this kind, nothing had ever approached the enthusiasm and even frenzy displayed by the people of Dublin. There were, however, two places where I heard ugly sounds like booing, but they only seemed like a sort of bagpipe drone to the highly-pitched note of the cheering.30

  'Felt quite sorry that all was over,' the Queen wrote on her return to England in April 1900. 'I can never forget the really wild enthusiasm and affectionate loyalty displayed by all in Ireland, and shall ever retain a most grateful remembrance of this warm-hearted, sympathetic people.'31

  She had been in England for less than a month when news arrived from South Africa of the relief of Mafeking. The people went 'quite mad with delight', she recorded in her journal. She herself was visiting Wellington College where her grandson, Princess Beatrice's son, 'Drino', had started his first term; and she was greeted by a banner stretched across an arch to 'welcome the Queen of Mafeking'. When she returned to Windsor Castle she was welcomed by a crowd of Eton boys gathered in the Upper Quadrangle to sing patriotic songs to her. She leaned out of her window to say, 'Thank you, thank you', repeating the words many times; and, as she listened to the last song, the boys were intrigued to see an Indian servant appear by her side to hand her a scotch and soda.32

  Chapter 57

  DEATH OF BROWN

  'I am in such terrible distress at the loss not only of my best & most faithful attendant but at the loss of my dearest and best friend.'

  One morning in March 1883, a year after the attempt upon her life by the Scottish soi-disant poet, Roderick Maclean, John Brown had woken up at Windsor with a high fever and a return of the swellings on his face and head indicative of the erysipelas which had troubled him before. He was said to be 'quite helpless all day'. He had recently caught a severe cold while driving through an icy wind in an open dog cart to deliver a message from the Queen to Lady Florence Dixie, in Dr Reid's opinion 'rather a queer customer', who complained improbably that she had been assaulted by two men, possibly Fenians, dressed as women, and had been saved from serious injury only by the sudden appearance of her St Bernard dog.1

  The days passed and Brown - who had spent hours searching for the Fenians or for clues that might lead to their apprehension - lay increasingly ill in the Clarence Tower. On 26 March Dr Reid noted that 'he was worse' and, additionally, suffering from delirium tremens.2 The Queen was not, of course, told of this; indeed she was unaware of how ill he was. There was, in any case, no question of her going to see him, since she had fallen downstairs the week before and had subsequently suffered a succession of extremely painful rheumatic attacks and sleepless nights. 'She is confined to her couch,' Dr Reid wrote home to his mother, 'and has me in to see her very often.' She managed to walk round her sitting room, supported on his arm; but she could not climb the stairs. On the 27th Reid reported to his mother that he thought that Brown would die; and by then the Queen had worked herself up 'into a great state of grief about him'.3

  Brown did die that night; and, when told of his death by Prince Leopold, who had 'deep sympathy' for her 'without being sorry for the cause',4 she was said to be inconsolable, in her own words 'very miserable and stunned'. Supported by Princess Beatrice, she managed to hobble up the stairs to Clarence Tower for the funeral service which was held in the room where her friend had died and where he lay as though in state for six days. A wreath of white flowers and myrtle placed on the coffin, which was to be taken for burial at Crathie, bore the legend: 'From his best and most faithful friend, Victoria R. I'.

  'I have lost my dearest best friend who no-one in this World can ever replace,' she wrote to her grandson, Prince George of Wales. 'Never forget your poor sorrowing old Grandmama's best & truest friend.' 'He became my best & truest friend,' she repeated in a letter to the minister at Crathie. 'Weep with me,' she asked Brown's sister-in-law, 'for we all have lost the best, the truest heart that ever beat. My grief is unbounded, dreadful and I know not how to bear it, or how to believe it possible ... Dear, dear John - my dearest best friend to whom I could say everything & who always protected me so kindly. You have your husband - your support, but I have no strong arm now.'

  To her daughter Vicky, the Queen wrote: 'I feel so stunned and bewildered. He protected me so - that I felt safe! And now all, all is gone in this world, and all seems unhinged again in thousands of ways ... The shock - the blow, the blank, the constant missing at every turn of the one strong, powerful arm and head ... This anguish that comes over me like a wave ... is terrible ... God's will be done but I shall never be the same again.'

  She told Vicky's youngest daughter that Brown, 'for 18 years & 1/2 had never left [her] for a single day'.

  'Friends have fallen on all sides,' she wrote to Tennyson who provided her with a tribute for the plinth of a life-size statue commissioned from Joseph Edgar Boehm:

  Friend more than servant, Loyal, Truthful, Brave!

  Self less than Duty, even to the Grave

  'One by one I have lost those I car
ed for and leant on most,' the Queen lamented. 'And now again I have lost one who humble though he was - was the truest and most devoted of all! He had no thought but for me, my welfare, my comfort, my safety, my happiness ... He was part of my life.' Even her letters to her young granddaughters were filled with such lamentations. 'I am in such terrible distress at the loss of my best & most faithful attendant ... my dearest and best friend,' she wrote to one of them, Princess Victoria of Hesse. 'I am so lonely and since dear Grandpapa was taken have one by one lost all those who cld be a help & support to me - & this one of my dear devoted, faithful attendant and trust [sic] friend ... whose help and support I miss hourly ... The constant missing of that dearest Brown depresses me so terribly & makes everything so sad and joyless.'5

  To others she wrote and spoke in similar terms, expressing a sorrow that she felt she would carry with her to her own grave.[lxvi] She treasured the letters of condolence she received and she stuck the more feeling ones into a scrapbook. At the same time she decreed that Brown's room in the Clarence Tower should be preserved just as he had left it, and that a fresh flower should be placed every day upon his pillow. She set about raising memorials to him. As well as Boehm's statue at Balmoral, she ordered a granite seat inscribed with lines by Byron for Osborne and a life-size portrait from the German painter, Karl Sohn.[lxvii] She had a eulogy printed in the Court Circular - which was five times as long as that accorded to her other 'most valued and devoted friend', Disraeli - a bronze tablet erected to his memory in the mausoleum at Frogmore -with the word 'insribed' mispelled thus and not corrected - the only memorial there not commemorating a member of her family; and, to members of the Household, she gave various mementoes, most unwanted, such as the blue and gold enamel locket containing Brown's portrait which was presented to James Reid. Every year thereafter she went to Crathie to lay a wreath of flowers on his grave. To the horror of the Household, she planned a biography of Brown to be written, she hoped, by Sir Theodore Martin, the fifth volume of whose life of Prince Albert had been published in 1880.