I cannot stop myself from writing you two little words of felicitation on your marriage. I assure you that I have thought of you much during the 10th. In truth a wedding day is a day quite solemn and quite disagreeable to pass. This always happens, even for anybody who loves such occasions a lot, but once this is over, one is entirely at one’s ease. I have read in the newspapers [about] the whole ceremony. It must have been quite beautiful, and I am certain that Albert has made a great impression and that he was much praised. Also I have much admired your enormous composure throughout the ceremony. I assure you that I was much more embarrassed than you. I hope that God will grant my wishes and you will be the happiest of women. I also hope that soon, too, you will give me little cousins whom I shall love with all my heart.
In 1905, no published letters by a woman would have included references to pregnancy or personal health, so it is not surprising to find that Benson and Esher omitted nearly all mention of these matters. Their belief that they could show the ‘full development of the character of the Queen’ without these topics also reflected their particularly narrow understanding of female experience. They even went so far as to record the arrival of Victoria’s first child in a footnote, several pages after its chronological place. This downplaying of the birth of the Prince of Wales – the first male heir to be born to a Queen regnant for hundreds of years – probably reflected specific directions from King Edward VII concerning ‘personal and private’ material, particularly concerning himself.
As young queens, Victoria and Maria shared an unusual position. For them both, pregnancy, childbirth and recovery occupied much of their time during the early years of their reigns. During the twenty-one years of her marriage, Victoria gave birth to nine children, all of whom survived into adulthood. During the first five years of her marriage, Victoria was either pregnant or recovering from childbirth for all but sixteen of sixty months – that is, for nearly 75 per cent of the time (as illustrated on page 124).
These figures stated baldly hardly show the impact these pregnancies and births had on the queens’ public and private lives. Particular aspects of pregnancy and childbirth, such as anxiety at the start of each new pregnancy, ailments such as nausea, bleeding, tiredness and changes in appetite, and the potential complications during and after birth, were not easily accommodated within a public life of levées, soirées, official visits and political crises. Rather dramatically, a major military challenge to Dona Maria’s power coincided with the onset of her first labour in 1837 and remained unresolved for several weeks. In 1842, Victoria too experienced a collision of public and private: arriving in Edinburgh in the first week of September, she refused to take part in the customary welcoming procession through the city. The Scots were very critical. Her third child, Princess Alice, was born on 25 April 1843; calculating backwards suggests that Victoria’s arrival in Edinburgh would have coincided with the symptoms of early pregnancy – probably exacerbated by the sea voyage from London – which may explain her reluctance. (She was persuaded to drive through the streets in procession several hours later to placate the waiting crowds. Perhaps the nausea had passed.)
Despite these women’s privileged living conditions, rank and wealth in the nineteenth century provided no guarantee against disease and infection. The letters between these two royal mothers show their many anxieties concerning their own health and that of their children: breastfeeding and wet nurses, smallpox inoculations, weaning, teething, then education; anxiety about their husbands’ health and the dangers of hunting, for example. The roles of queen, wife and mother all had their inherent dangers: these women experienced assassination attempts; epidemics of scarlet fever, cholera and typhoid; the high incidence of tuberculosis; the deaths in childbirth of female friends and relatives. In addition, they each had to carry out their duties in public, with little allowance made for their worries or discomforts. In sharing their anxieties (as well as more frivolous gossip), Maria and Victoria exchanged support and information.
There was a delicate and poignant occasion in October 1840, just weeks before Queen Victoria’s first confinement. Dona Maria had recently given birth to her third child, her first daughter, who was stillborn. Ferdinand wrote to Victoria and Albert to tell them the sad news before Maria wrote to Victoria a month later. In seeking to alleviate any alarm Victoria might have felt, Maria reverted to a more light-hearted style:
My dear Victoria
Well, for quite a long time that I have not been able to have the great pleasure of writing to you but you know the reason for that quite well from all of Ferdinand’s letters. I hope that my affair will not have affected you too much, for in your state it is necessary to try and avoid this if that is possible. It hardly ever happens; but I am convinced now that you will be quite safe and that you will present us with a very beautiful and very bonny, little male Cousin …
Dona Maria was to experience the premature deaths of four babies. In all she gave birth to eleven children before she died in her thirty-fourth year following the birth of a stillborn child in 1853.
In their discussions of motherhood, the two women hid, indeed were expected to hide, their true emotions and anxieties, both negative and positive: their fears of pain, of failure, and of death, and their delight in parenthood. But they found ways to express, with humility and cheerfulness, their feelings, and this is particularly evident in Dona Maria’s writing. Maria lifted the mask a little when she wrote to Victoria about the forthcoming confinement of Ferdinand’s sister, Victoire, the Duchess of Nemours:
Victoire has written me a letter which has given us very great pleasure for she announces that she will present us a nephew or niece; she desires very much a boy, may God grant her that; she or he will be born at the same time as mine which I find very agreeable for us both; I wished that that were already over for her for I find that the first is a terrible event.
Writing about a third person, Maria could express her fears more openly than when describing her own experiences. Victoria was similarly direct when she wrote to her newly pregnant eldest daughter, Vicky, in 1858. In this correspondence she frequently raged against pregnancy and childbirth:
I think much more of our being like a cow or a dog at such moments; when our poor nature becomes so very animal and unecstatic – but for you, dear, if you are sensible and reasonable and not in ecstasy nor spending your day with nurses and wet nurses, which is the ruin of many a refined and intellectual young lady, without adding to her real maternal duties, a child will be a great resource. Above all, dear girl, do remember never to lose the modesty of a young girl towards others (without being prude); though you are married don’t become a matron to whom everything can be said and who minds saying nothing herself – I remained to a particular degree (indeed feel so now) and often feel schocked [sic] at the confidences of other married ladies. I fear abroad they are very indelicate about these things …
These letters are in direct contrast to her surviving journal entries from those early mothering years, and to her letters to her women friends. Victoria delighted in showing her baby daughter off to Lord Melbourne before Privy Council meetings and in standing over the crib as the baby ‘smiled up at her and cooed’. Benson and Esher probably did not see the later letters of Victoria to her daughter; had they done so we can be sure they would not have been published.
Maria and Victoria both adhered absolutely to the idea of patriarchy, and with their husbands sought to implement it in their domestic lives. In reply to Maria’s letter of 8 May 1842, Victoria wrote:
All that you tell me in your letter of 8th in reference to your position has interested me greatly, and I assure you that I share entirely your opinion, the husband should always be first; I’m doing everything in order that it be thus – and I am always saddened that he must be below me in rank; for it pains me to be Queen and he merely the Prince; but in my heart, and in my house, he comes first and is the master and head …
In 1847, Maria praised Ferdinand and his executiv
e abilities to Victoria, who replied:
You have spoken to me with quite some warmth about your concern that Ferdinand be known to the world for … his great experience and his knowledge of political matters, as well as for his strong and noble character … In Ferdinand you have foremost a man superior to those around him, and a soul who will share all your sentiments; – I can therefore only give you the good advice to continue to ensure his place in your counsels, which is due to him and which he will always employ with much success for you as Queen, as Wife and as Mother.
The inclusion of Victoria’s correspondence with Maria, and with her other female confidantes, would have given a much fuller picture of her life and personality. These young women were grappling with similar worries and dilemmas, both as wives and mothers and as sovereigns. Their letters helped them to make sense of their experiences and to offset their sense of social isolation. Benson and Esher recognised none of these issues, preferring instead to focus almost exclusively on Victoria’s relationships with men. As they wrote in their Introduction, ‘Confident, in a sense, as she was, she had the feminine instinct strongly developed of dependence upon some manly adviser.’ They selected and edited her letters with this ‘dependence’ in mind. In the process, they omitted key aspects of Victoria’s character, an omission that would persist for at least the first half of the twentieth century.
Chapter 10
THE QUEEN AND HER MINISTERS
AS LORD ESHER WAS editing the letters he was becoming ever closer to the King, but he found that the King was not as powerful as he might wish. He and the King’s private secretary, Lord Knollys, believed Edward VII was not being ‘kept informed’ as he should have been by his ministers. It is ironical that St John Brodrick, Secretary of State for War at the beginning of Edward’s reign, held that one of the greatest impediments to open ministerial consultation with the monarch was Esher’s closeness to the King and his presence on two important committees, the South African War Committee and then the War Office Reconstitution Committee. In his memoirs, Brodrick recalled:
Before long it became clear that by the time any decision had come to the point when Cabinet could lay it before the Sovereign, the issue had been largely pre-judged, on the incomplete premises of an observer who had no official status. In other words, Esher, whether intentionally or not, had constituted himself the unofficial adviser of the Crown, and his ambition to control what he termed ‘the hornet’s nest’ [the War Office] from the outside became for a moment the ruling passion of his life.
Queen Victoria’s letters revealed to Esher a monarch who, with her consort, was fully in charge of her ministers. He saw the early years of Victoria’s reign as a time when individual ministers such as Peel and Aberdeen, and even those as ‘headstrong as Palmerston or as truculent as Russell’, were careful not only ‘to keep the Sovereign informed’ but also to ask the sovereign’s advice ‘before final decisions were reached in Cabinet upon all questions of substance’. It was, Esher claimed, ‘a system of Government which was brought almost to perfection in the middle of the last century’.
Esher was hugely admiring of Queen Victoria’s and the Prince’s industriousness and their executive abilities: ‘Certainly the work done by her and the P. Consort was amazing … it was in their heyday of youth and prosperity.’ Whatever he hoped for his King, he knew that Edward was more than sixty years old and was never going to exert himself to this extent. Nevertheless, Victoria’s methods became for Esher a blueprint for the proper relationship between a sovereign and his or her ministers. In August 1905, he set out his ideas in a long letter to Lord Knollys:
I can only tell you, that after studying now, with great completeness, the history of the relation of the Crown to different Administrations, extending over sixty years, … that the monarchical system as understood by Sir Robert Peel, Lord Aberdeen, Lord Palmerston and Lord Derby, and as worked by them in conjunction with the Queen, was of immense value to the State and to the people of this country … the Sovereign’s interferences and tenacity, both of which were very remarkable, had on several very vital occasions stayed the action of a Minister, when such action involved risks and perils which reflection convinced him and his colleagues they were not justified in incurring.
There is one very notable example, which is the action of the Sovereign in restraining Lord John Russell in 1859, when, but for the tenacity of the Crown, England would have been mixed up in the Austro-Italian war …
It would only waste your time if I were to amplify examples … [but they] are object lessons which, if the dignity of High Office under the Crown is to be maintained, the present Prime Minister and his successor ought to take them seriously to heart.
Esher ensured that plenty of room was found for such examples in the published letters. This was history with a purpose: to show present-day ministers their proper place. The centrepiece was Victoria’s insistence on the dismissal of her Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, in 1851.
When Victoria first came to the throne, Palmerston was a man of fifty-three. He was still handsome and vigorous, and still bore the nickname ‘Cupid’ from his university days. Just prior to Victoria’s marriage to Albert, Palmerston married his paramour of thirty years, the sister of Lord Melbourne, Emily Cowper, a widowed lady-in-waiting to Victoria. As a pair of twenty-year-olds, Victoria and Albert were amused by the ‘elderly lovers’ (who were in their fifties): ‘I am sure it will make you smile,’ Victoria wrote to Albert. ‘They make up a century between them,’ Albert quipped.
As Foreign Secretary in the Whig governments of the 1830s, Palmerston had become a major figure in international politics. He had secured the independence of the Belgian throne with Leopold at its head, assisted Dona Maria II in Portugal and Queen Isabella in Spain, been involved in Greece and Turkey, and resisted Russian encroachments in the Middle East. He came to be cordially detested by absolutist monarchs and their ministers, and he remained ever suspicious of French expansionist intentions, which he thwarted at every opportunity. His relations with Victoria were at first friendly, during the years of the Melbourne ministry and before her marriage. Alongside Lord Melbourne and Lady Cowper, he frequently dined with the young Queen. Palmerston advised Victoria in much the same avuncular tone and manner as did Melbourne, and Victoria welcomed this advice. Benson and Esher included a sample of his gentlemanly humour in the Letters:
Viscount Palmerston … begs to state that he has reason to believe, from what Count Pollon [Sardinian Minister to England] said to him in conversation two days ago, that the Duke of Lucca [an independent Italian state] has a notion that Sovereign Princes who have had the honour of dining with your Majesty, have been invited by note not by card. If that should be so, and if your Majesty should invite the Duke of Lucca to dine at the Palace before his departure, perhaps the invitation should be made by note instead of card, as it was when the Duke last dined at the Palace. Your Majesty may think this is a small matter, but the Duke is a small Sovereign.
After her marriage, Victoria began to express stronger views about foreign policy. The change became more obvious after May 1840, when Albert solicited Melbourne’s, Anson’s and Stockmar’s help to persuade (or even force) Victoria to allow him access to the ministerial papers. His access to these documents gave him a surer footing from which to comment on foreign affairs. Benson and Esher included several letters that revealed this shift. In September 1840, Victoria told Leopold that ‘Albert, who sends his love, is much occupied with the Eastern Affairs.’ A few months later, she wrote a long and closely argued reply to Palmerston’s letter of 11 November 1840 on the same topic, which sounds much more like Albert than Victoria. (Their first child was born ten days later.)
After 1841, Palmerston was out of office and had little to do with the Court. Victoria dealt with Aberdeen as Foreign Secretary, who was more malleable. But upon Palmerston’s return as Foreign Secretary in 1846 in Lord John Russell’s Whig government, relations grew increasingly hostile. The Queen and Princ
e Albert frequently complained about not being informed in advance of Palmerston’s decisions. Following the congenial relationship between Victoria and Palmerston in the early years of her reign, Albert’s influence in these subsequent years was striking. He had persuaded Victoria that Palmerston’s urbanity was rakish.
Although many of these letters were published, they were so numerous that Benson could make only a representative selection. Very few of them carry Albert’s name, although from 1843 he wrote summaries of every interview the Queen held, penned memoranda and even gradually began to draft many of her official letters.
In August 1850, Victoria wrote to John Russell and directed him to pass a message on to Palmerston:
With reference to the conversation about Lord Palmerston which the Queen had with Lord John Russell the other day, and Lord Palmerston’s disavowal that he ever intended any disrespect to her by the various neglects of which she has had so long and so often to complain, she thinks it right, in order to prevent any mistakes in the future, shortly to explain what she expects of her Foreign Secretary. She requires:
(1) That he will distinctly state what he proposes in a given case, in order that the Queen may know as distinctly to what she has given her Royal sanction;
(2) Having once given her sanction to a measure, that it may not be arbitrarily altered or modified by the Minister; such an act she must consider as failing in sincerity towards the Crown, and justly to be visited by the exercise of her Constitutional right of dismissing that Minister. She expects to be kept informed of what passes between him and the Foreign Ministers before important decisions are taken based on that intercourse; to receive Foreign Despatches in good time, and to have the drafts for approval sent to her in sufficient time to make herself acquainted with their contents before they must be sent off. The Queen thinks it best that Lord John Russell should show this letter to Lord Palmerston.
Censoring Queen Victoria Page 11