Queen Victoria's Mysterious Daughter

by Lucinda Hawksley

  Bertie was still in Cambridge, and in disgrace, when his father was dying. He was sent for and reached Windsor at around three o’clock in the morning of his father’s final day. Throughout that last, agonising day, the older children were gathered around their father and Queen Victoria wrote in her journal:

  I bent over him and said to him ‘Es ist Kleines Frauchen’ [it’s your ‘little wife’] and he bowed his head; I asked him if he would give me ‘ein Kuss’ [a kiss] and he did so. He seemed half dozing, quite quiet … I left the room for a moment and sat down on the floor in utter despair. Attempts at consolation from others only made me worse … Alice told me to come in … and I took his dear left hand which was already cold, though the breathing was quite gentle and I knelt down by him … Alice was on the other side, Bertie and Lenchen … kneeling at the foot of the bed … Two or three long but perfectly gentle breaths were drawn, the hand clasping mine and … all, all was over.

  The younger children, including Louise, were taken to see their father before being sent to bed. They took his hand and kissed him, but by that time Albert was unable to recognise any of them. Lady Augusta Stanley, who was at Windsor at the time of the prince consort’s death, noted that ‘Poor Princess Louise did not learn of the end until the morning. Poor lamb.’ Matthew Dennison, in his biography of Princess Beatrice, quotes an account given by one of the servants, about how Queen Victoria reacted to the news that her husband had died: ‘The Queen ran through the ante-room where I was waiting. She seemed wild. She went straight up to the nursery and took Baby Beatrice out of bed, but she did not wake her … Orders were given at once for the removal of the Court to Osborne.’

  After taking Beatrice from her bed, the queen wrapped her youngest child in Albert’s clothes. For a long time after her husband’s death, the queen would sleep holding tightly to her favourite child, still swathed in her dead father’s clothing. Princess Louise felt keenly the death of her father and her inability to comfort her mother. As a sensitive 13-year-old, she had no idea how she was expected to behave or how to deal with her grief and convinced herself that the wrong person had died, wishing she could have sacrificed herself to save her father. She sobbed to the ladies-in-waiting: ‘Oh, why did not God take me? I am so stupid and useless.’

  The funeral was held on 23 December. It was an age when women and girls were not expected to attend. The queen did not choose to make an exception to the rule; feeling she could not cope with seeing her beloved Albert consigned to the ground, she took her daughters to Osborne, leaving Bertie and Arthur as chief mourners. The queen’s letters following the death of her husband reveal the depth of her grief. As she said to Vicky, her world had revolved around her husband. She asked her daughter how she could be expected to live without Albert, how she could go on without the man ‘without whom I did nothing, not moved a finger, arranged not a print or photograph, didn’t put on a gown or bonnet if he didn’t approve it[. How] shall [I] be able to go on, to live, to move, to help myself in difficult moments?’ She told her uncle Leopold, ‘the world is gone for me!’ and kept the room in which he died, the Blue Room, exactly as it was in his last moments. When Charles Dickens had written about Miss Havisham in Great Expectations,2 who kept her clothing and home precisely as they had been when she discovered her fiancé had jilted her, he could have been writing about his monarch. For the rest of her life, Queen Victoria insisted that the Blue Room remain unchanged: even the glass from which Albert had drunk his last sip was left beside his bed. This was not, she insisted, morbid; the room was preserved as a ‘living beautiful monument’. She also commissioned a bust of her deceased husband, which was placed in the room beside the bed in which he had died. Vicky came back to England as soon as she was able to and comforted her younger siblings. When she was about to return to Prussia in early April 1862, Louise wrote to Arthur, ‘I am so unhappy she is going.’ Louise also told her brother that the five sisters had been photographed together, but the end result was so unflattering that the photographer had been ordered to do it again.

  As the country went into mourning for the prince consort, the theatres and other places of entertainment were closed as a mark of respect. The streets were full of people wearing funereal black. According to Benjamin Disraeli, ‘This German Prince has governed England for 21 years with a wisdom and energy such as none of our kings has ever shown.’ The British public could have had no idea how long this mourning would last. Following the death of her husband, the queen suffered continually from depression – a condition that was not understood in her lifetime. Had she not been the monarch, she could have been in very real danger of incarceration: in nineteenth-century Britain most people suffering from depression ended up in lunatic asylums.

  The mourning into which Queen Victoria plunged her family and her household would blight Louise’s life and make her adolescence even more difficult than it might otherwise have been. At times the queen would insist that one of her daughters (usually Beatrice) slept with her; then just as suddenly she would push her away, wanting no one except Albert. The queen seemed incapable of understanding that her children had lost their father – and a father who had been the less emotionally complicated parent. Albert had certainly not been averse to punishing his children (as Bertie’s often desperately sad stories of his childhood attest), but he had been more understanding, kindly and empathetic than Victoria. King George V, Bertie’s eldest son, would famously recount that he expected his children to be as frightened of him as he had been of his father and as his father had been of his mother. There was no mention of Albert as a tyrannical parent in that reminiscence, only of Victoria. In her memoirs, Lady Augusta Stanley recalled overhearing a conversation between the young Queen Victoria and her mother, the Duchess of Kent, that upset her. When Leopold was six years old and had been naughty, the queen wanted to beat him and the duchess wanted her to excuse him on account of his being so young. Lady Augusta wrote in her journal:

  The Duchess excused poor Leo tonight – ‘he was so young, his passions would go off as he was six.’

  ‘Oh,’ said his Mama ‘I don’t know what we should do then – whip him well?’ The Duchess said how sad it made her to hear a child cry, ‘it makes an impression’.

  ‘Not when you have 8 Mama – that wears off. You could not go through that each time one of the 8 cried!!’

  Where most parents would have found their children a solace in grief, for Victoria, in the early days of her widowhood, her children became more of a trial, as they had been following the death of her mother. Bereft of Albert, Beatrice, her ‘baby’, was usually the only one she wanted near her. As the queen wrote to Vicky shortly after Albert’s death, Beatrice was the only ‘bright spot in this dead home’. It was noted by the household that the queen began taking almost all her meals ‘tête à tête’ with Beatrice and that Beatrice was allowed to behave as she liked, being ‘impertinent’ to the servants and members of the household, while the other children were scolded constantly.

  In addition to the loss of their father, the younger royal children were subjected to their mother’s violent fury with their oldest brother. The queen wrote to Vicky that she could not look at Bertie ‘without a shudder’ and that she wanted the world to know ‘the real truth’ about him; she urged Vicky to tell people it was all Bertie’s fault: that Bertie’s reprehensible behaviour had killed his father. A few weeks after Albert’s death, Bertie left England for the Middle East, a journey that had been organised by his father in an attempt to educate Bertie in world politics. Many of the queen’s advisors suggested the trip should be postponed, but Victoria was adamant that her son should go and break the ‘constant contact which is more than ever unbearable to me’. Nearly a year later, Bertie spent his twenty-first birthday away from his family. Louise missed him dreadfully and wrote him a birthday letter, to which he responded, ‘I was very sorry to have been prevented from spending it with you … But as this year is one of mourning and sadness, it is perhaps better that I shou
ld have been away.’

  Something that been long anticipated and prepared for by Prince Albert in the final months of his life was the wedding of Princess Alice to Prince Louis of Hesse, at which Louise was a funereal bridesmaid. (When the engagement had been announced to Alice’s siblings, Louise discovered that Alice had already confided in Lenchen but not in her; she was hurt by the snub, but simply told her mother she had ‘expected it’.) Much as she longed to, the queen was persuaded not to cancel the wedding because her husband would have wanted it to go ahead. From the time of Albert’s death to the end of the queen’s long life, almost every mention of the word ‘wedding’ seemed a personal assault. Her letters are full of comments about how much she hates weddings, how bad marriage is for women and how few marriages are likely to last. Many years later, when her physician, Dr James Reid, requested permission to marry, the queen was furious and although she was not able to forbid the marriage, she tried to prevent the couple from being able to live together after their marriage. The queen, who did not attend the wedding, was highly irritated that her family and friends were all so pleased; she complained that on the wedding day she would have no one left to bring her tea, as all her usual companions (and many of her servants) were going to the ceremony.

  For Alice and Louis’s wedding on 1 July 1862 the chapel was swathed in black and the queen and Prince Alfred cried openly throughout. Although Alice was permitted to wear her white wedding dress, which had taken many months and many seamstresses to create, she was expected to change it for mourning almost as soon as the ceremony was over. Alice understood not only her mother’s unusual personality but also that her mother was extremely depressed and she tried very hard not to show her how happy she was. The queen described her second daughter’s wedding as ‘more like a funeral than a wedding’ and confessed that when Alice told her how proud and happy she was to have married Louis it was as ‘though a dagger is plunged in my bleeding, desolate heart’.

  When Alice left England to live in Germany, Louise lost another of her allies. Alice was renowned for being the peacemaker of the family. She was sweet to her little sister and, although she was angered by Louise’s jealousy of Beatrice, she was understanding and kind to her. Before Alice’s marriage, she had been the queen’s amanuensis, a job that involved long hours at her mother’s beck and call, answering her sackfuls of correspondence and working tirelessly to understand all the aspects of politics and state events. When Alice left home, this job fell to Helena, something ‘Lenchen’ had been dreading. In 1863, Louise wrote an amusing letter to Vicky: ‘Mama gave a council this morning and the Archbishop of York did homage, Lenchen was present, she said that Mama held his hands up whilst he was taking [the] oath and then afterwards he kissed the Bible. Lenchen said she felt such an inclination to laugh.’

  Despite this levity, Louise was all too aware that when Helena married it would be her turn to take on the cloying and claustrophobic role. Even before Helena left the family home, Louise could not avoid carrying out her mother’s whims. A letter survives, dated 9 July 1863, which was obviously dictated by her mother and must have caused Louise distress. It was, purportedly, from Louise to her brother Arthur:

  Dear Mama wishes me to tell you that she will write to you soon, and she hopes you are working very hard for your examination. She is very anxious that you should pass it well, for if you did not it would make her very unhappy, she fears you are rather lazy. Believe me ever dear Arthur your most loving sister.

  CHAPTER 5

  The first sculpture

  The much-to-be-remembered day of my first entering upon Maid-of-Honour duties … the 2 Princesses … both kissed me. Prss. Louise is very pretty.

  Diary of Lady Caroline Lyttelton, 10 September 1863

  In the year of Alice’s wedding, 1862, a Hungarian-Viennese sculptor named Joseph Edgar Boehm arrived in London with his wife. He settled in the city and made his debut at the Royal Academy in the same year, with a terracotta Bust of a Gentleman. Although he and Louise had not yet met, he would have a great impact on her future. Following Alice’s wedding, Louise threw herself into her study of art. Her fourteenth birthday had been a muted affair, and she was finding increasing solace in her pursuit of artistic freedom. Her new art tutor was William Leitch, a landscape artist from Scotland, renowned for his watercolours. Leitch was the art tutor to all the royal family (although the queen stopped her lessons after her husband’s death and did not resume them for some years). Leitch taught only painting and drawing, but Louise was continuing to improve her technique in sculpture, an art form that had intrigued her from a very young age, when she first saw the sculptress Mary Thornycroft at work on a commission for her parents. Thornycroft was commissioned to make marble sculptures of the royal babies’ hands, feet and limbs; in 1848 the sculptor had taken a plaster cast of the baby Princess Louise’s left arm and hand while she slept, from which she produced a beautiful marble sculpture. It is still in the Royal Collection.

  By the end of 1862, the newspapers were buzzing with the news of another royal wedding. The heir to the throne had become engaged to Princess Alexandra, the daughter of the soon-to-be Danish king. ‘Alix’ was a welcome addition to the royal house of mourning. The queen and her youngest children had been travelling in Albert’s home country when Bertie sent news of his engagement, in a desperate attempt to please his mother. At last he seemed to have done something of which she, tentatively at first, approved – although Albert’s brother Ernst was not happy about the match. He and Albert had argued by letter when Albert first said that he hoped to secure the Danish princess for his son. Denmark and Prussia were not on amicable political terms and Ernst felt snubbed that Bertie had not chosen a Prussian princess. While they were in Prussia, the queen noted in her journal with a remarkable calmness that Leopold, her haemophiliac son, had suffered an accident. The top entry in her journal for that day was that she had gone out with Lenchen and Louise to try and interest herself in sketching again. ‘Poor Leopold,’ she continued, ‘has a sore mouth, having by accident stuck a pen into his palate, which has caused severe bleeding which could not be stopped, & he could hardly eat anything. – Had luncheon with the 5 daughters. Drove with Alice and good Miss Hildyard to the Inselberg.’ Her lack of concern is a mark of how self-obsessed the depressed queen had become. If a situation wasn’t purely about her, she could not summon up interest.

  In autumn 1862, the queen met Alix for the first time, and liked her. Alix’s diplomacy was made explicit in the fact that she dressed in black: already she understood how to handle her intended motherin-law. Although the public liked to believe this was a true, romantic match, it was actually the result of many years of planning. Initially, Victoria had been loath to accept anyone from the Danish royal family, because of past history and recent Danish hostilities with her beloved Germany. Prince Alfred also tried to prevent the alliance with Denmark, which had caused an argument between him and Bertie. The match, however, was a good one – and it was very popular with the British public, who were fed up with the queen’s partiality for Germany.1

  Louise was enchanted by her brother’s beautiful and poised fiancée. It was noted by several observers, including Queen Victoria, how different Louise was when Alix was in the room: she did not cause trouble – she sat and talked and behaved herself. Alix treated Louise in a way that few people had bothered to do before. Instead of starting their acquaintance with the usual assumption Louise was stupid or disobedient or deliberately difficult, Alix simply talked to her kindly, as a future sister-in-law. The awkward teenager blossomed and their relationship was close from the start. Alix had arrived in a foreign country, where she had to speak either German or English, never her native Danish, and she knew her future motherin-law was formidable. She also knew that the queen considered Alix’s parents scandalous and many of her close relations too immoral to be invited to the wedding. When she encountered sisters-in-law longing to be friends, it made Alix’s transition to England much easier than she
had feared. Towards the end of her life, Louise would describe Alix and herself as the closest of sisters. In Alix’s letters to Louise she uses such endearments as ‘My beloved Louise’, ‘My own dearest Louise’ and ‘my little pet’. She was one of the few people to take Louise’s side in family arguments, writing to her during one of Louise’s depressingly long stays at Balmoral that she hoped Louise was not being ‘teased too much’.

  Despite liking Alix, the queen was unhappy about the prospect of yet another wedding. While her children anticipated the wedding with excitement, the queen was being reminded of how happy she had been and how depressed she was now. She recorded in her journal the ‘trembling voice’ with which she had read to a small group of assembled ministers the declaration of Bertie’s marriage. ‘The children were quite distressed at my pale face when I came down to luncheon,’ she wrote on 1 November 1862. She grumbled incessantly about the wedding preparations and said Bertie was far too ‘noisy’ and held him responsible for her ‘bad headaches’. On 8 November, with the first anniversary of Albert’s death looming, she wrote sadly in her journal: ‘My sorrow seems to increase day by day, & my terrible loneliness overwhelms me.’

  Louise too was suffering, and began to be plagued with headaches – such agonising pains that she was unable to leave her room. These became a regular problem for Louise and one that would continue into old age. Her physical health was always affected by nervous stress and emotional depression. Whether these early headaches were caused by stress, by a change in teenage hormones or by some other physical problem is unknown; perhaps she suffered from migraines. Or they may have provided a good excuse: sometimes a day alone in her bedroom was infinitely preferable to a day spent with her mother.