Queen Victoria's Mysterious Daughter

by Lucinda Hawksley

  The princess was always happiest when she was physically active, the indolent lifestyle favoured by her mother and younger sister made her frustrated; she was also terrified of giving in to the Hanoverian tendency to corpulence. On the day of this particular excursion, the party ate scones and cakes and drank tea together while looking out over Dhu Loch, and then the queen and her party returned in their carriage, leaving the walkers to make their own way home. When Louise arrived back, she went dutifully to her mother to relate every minute detail of the proposal. The queen recorded in her journal the report Louise had given her: ‘Lorne had spoken of his devotion to her and proposed to her and … she had accepted him, knowing that I would approve. Though I was not unprepared for this result, I felt painfully the thought of losing her. But I naturally gave my consent and could only pray that she might be happy.’ The queen ordered a stone cairn to be erected in the grounds of Balmoral to mark the spot at which Lorne had proposed to Louise. The queen was grateful to Lady Ely for her help and tact and, as a memento of the occasion, presented her with a bracelet in a Celtic design, made of cabochon-cut local granites and silver; she also received a locket containing a photograph of Princess Louise.

  On 4 October 1870 the queen received Lorne officially for the first time since his proposal and wrote in her journal, ‘Saw Lorne for a few moments, who was much overcome, but spoke very nicely of his unworthiness, of his devotion to Louise, & of his anxiety to do all in his power to overcome difficulties & conciliate all.’ He gained his future motherin-law’s approbation when he was taken to the family mausoleum for the first time, to pay his respects to the almost beatified Albert, and professed himself very much impressed with it. Like Alix, Lorne learnt very early on that ingratiating himself with the queen was the most important step towards harmonious royal family life. Despite her newly engaged status, Louise was notably not an excited bride-to-be. On 5 October, Henry Ponsonby made reference to Louise being ‘moody’ and ‘absent-minded’. She was not as happy as her mother wanted the world to believe.

  The queen ensured that her new son-in-law was aware of how things were expected to be right from the beginning – he might be marrying Louise, but it was Queen Victoria’s happiness that Lorne was to consider above all else. She wrote to her future son-in-law, ‘Mine is a nature which requires being loved, and I have lost almost all those who loved me most on earth’ (an extraordinary statement for a woman with nine living children). She also noted with pleasure how worried Lorne’s father, the Duke of Argyll, appeared to be when she met him shortly after the news of the engagement was made public. He dutifully expressed concern about how ‘depressed’ the queen must be at the thought of ‘parting’ from Louise upon her marriage.

  The announcement of the engagement was popular with the public, but it caused an outcry in the royal family. The Prussian royals took it as a personal and political insult that Louise had chosen to marry someone British rather than a Prussian and Vicky was placed in a very difficult position. Bertie and Alix were equally angry, saying it was a disgrace that Louise was being allowed – and indeed encouraged – to marry a commoner, and the majority of their siblings seemed to feel the same way. The following month Bertie was at a house party at which Lorne’s father, the 8th Duke of Argyll, was also a guest. Bertie snubbed him publicly, making his opposition to the wedding apparent. Meanwhile, Louise was feeling very sorry for herself. An accident had left her with a knee injury and for the next few weeks she would make a slow recovery; this was especially frustrating for someone so reliant on exercise to make her happy. When the family left Balmoral, she could not walk at all and had to be carried. She spent the next couple of months on crutches, which made the queen fret that Louise would never walk again, thereby making her ‘unmarriageable’. (The injury would recur and plague Louise into old age, resulting in rheumatism in later years.)

  One surprising thing about Louise’s controversial betrothal was how much Queen Victoria supported it. While her other children were almost all displeased with their sister’s decision, the queen was strongly in favour of the match, writing a long letter to Bertie to refute all his arguments – for example the difficulty of a princess marrying below her rank and that Lorne was known to be a Liberal and would therefore cause problems when the royal family was not supposed to be political. In her letter the monarch, mindful of the recent family heartaches during the Franco-Prussian War, commented:

  Times have much changed; great foreign alliances are looked on as causes of trouble and anxiety … You may not be aware, as I am, with what dislike the marriages of Princesses … with small German Princes (‘German beggars’ as they most insultingly were called) were looked on … As to position, I see no difficulty whatsoever. Louise remains what she is, and her husband keeps his rank … only being treated in the family as a relation when we are together. It will strengthen the hold of the Royal Family, besides infusing new and healthy blood into it, whereas all the Princes abroad are related to each other … I feel sure that new blood will strengthen the throne morally as well as physically.

  The queen would later say with fond reminiscence how charmed she had been by the Marquess of Lorne when she had first encountered him as a pretty, belligerent toddler. Given the queen’s usual feelings about small children, this seems unlikely, but Victoria began to tell the story – and soon the newspapers were using it to suggest that Louise and Lorne had been childhood sweethearts. The majority of royal family members might not have been happy about the engagement, but the British public – and the British press – were thrilled.

  The queen must have had ulterior motives for ‘marrying off’ Louise as expediently as possible and to someone of a lower rank to whom the marriage would be an honour. Despite her fond reminiscences of the sweet little toddler, in reality when she met Lorne again as an adult her first impressions were nothing like as favourable. Most notably she complained that Lorne needed to wash more frequently. The queen did have her moments of indecision about the engagement, but whereas Bertie and Alix were vociferously against the match, the queen quite uncharacteristically supported it.

  There is a more than mild suggestion that the queen knew there were very good reasons why Louise should marry as soon as possible – and to someone who would not be in position to ‘pull rank’. This could have been because of Louise’s love affair with Boehm, or because Louise had already borne an illegitimate child; most likely it was both. Although I was not granted access to the Campbell family archives, I have been told by a researcher who has seen these archives that they hold a letter from the queen to the 8th Duke of Argyll written before the wedding, in which it is stated that Princess Louise is ‘barren’. How could the queen possibly have known that? Even if Louise’s teenage illness had been tubercular meningitis, it was by no means a foregone conclusion that she was, as a result, infertile. Several other sources also mention this letter and some suggest a particularly unpleasant rumour. The rumour is that, when Sir Charles Locock helped to deliver Louise’s illegitimate baby, the queen ordered the accoucher to ensure that Louise would be unable to bear any more children. This incredible rumour, however, is unlikely to be true, for several reasons. If the queen truly believed such an operation was possible, why did she continue to be so permanently laid low by her own hated pregnancies? The strongest refutation of such a suggestion, however, is that the Duke and Duchess of Argyll, as well as Lorne’s siblings, made constant enquiries as to Louise’s ‘health’ or ‘condition’. Every time Louise was even mildly ill, the Campbells would solicitously enquire if she were, at last, pregnant. As Louise was destined not to have any more children, it is more likely that complications occurred during Henry’s birth which made it impossible for her to have a successful pregnancy again, rather than that Charles Locock performed some mysterious procedure to make her ‘barren’.

  While the queen was in favour of Louise’s wedding, why were Louise’s siblings so opposed to the match? Vicky, one can understand – she was as conventional as her m
other and felt that the marriage would reflect badly on herself and her family (plus, she had been desperate to have one of her sisters living close to her). Helena had a more personal reason to be against the match: she realised that if Louise married Lorne she would end up spending much of her time in Scotland. Having been forced to live very close to her mother, Helena was in real danger of having to resume her former role as unpaid secretary. At the very least, if Louise were married and she and Lorne were living in London, Louise and Helena would be equal again and it was likely they would end up sharing the role.

  Why, however, was Bertie so adamantly against the match? Even when Louise had made up her mind and announced to her family that it was her desire to marry Lorne, Bertie remained angry. As unconventional as Louise, Bertie had always been her natural ally. One would have imagined that he would have backed her in her decision to marry and escape their mother’s home. That Alix had wanted Louise to marry her brother, Prince Frederick of Denmark, was common knowledge, and she was disappointed when Louise said no, but that doesn’t seem to have been the motive behind Bertie’s firm opposition to the match. He gave as one of his reasons Lorne’s Liberal politics, yet Bertie was usually happy about anything that would go against protocol. Could it have been that Bertie was more aware of Lorne’s real personality than anyone else in the family?

  Just as rumours persist about Louise, rumours about Lorne have been rife for well over a century. Marriage had not tempered Bertie and throughout his life he would continue to have affairs and to have friends who were equally scandalous. Bertie could tolerate most peccadilloes and indiscretions, yet for some reason was adamantly against Louise’s engagement. Perhaps Bertie had already heard rumours about Lorne, rumours that made him want to prevent his beloved sister from marrying the future Duke of Argyll. Several historians have written that Lorne was involved in a sexual relationship with another pupil while at Eton, and, in less savoury rumours, that he was one of the ‘favoured’ boys of a paedophiliac master, William Johnson, who was dismissed very suddenly in 1872.2 In the 1860s, Johnson composed a poem about two Eton boys and their love for each other. One of the boys in the poem was Lorne’s close friend, Frederick Wood; the other, although not named, was believed to be Lorne, suggested in the poem by Johnson’s reference to the Campbell family heraldic shield.3 In adult life, Lorne numbered many of the well-known gay underworld amongst his closest friends.

  The researcher Michael Gledhill was sent a letter in 1977 from H.J. Cavendish Bentinck, who wrote:

  My great aunt, who died ten years ago at an advanced age was a friend [of Princess Louise] … and the family still have several letters which we have always kept private … Firstly, to be frank, and you may already have found this out, there is the question of Lorne’s proclivities, in the other direction, which needed the private ‘handling’ by Edward VII … Louise was a charming, gifted woman, but you will find a wall of silence regarding so much of the life and through no fault of hers.

  Despite Bertie’s concerns, the world at large was unaware of any problems between the engaged couple. While Prussia continued to destroy France, the newspapers had happily moved on to royal wedding fever. On 5 January 1871, the Falkirk Herald published a first-person article about the people’s princess: ‘I remember so well the day when I first saw Her Royal Highness the Princess Louise,’ wrote the journalist.

  ‘It was a day in the early spring, soft and brilliant … I had made a journey of some little trouble to go to the royal Isle of Wight, for the foundation stone was to be laid of a building belonging to an institution that was dear to me, and the Princess Louise was to lay the first stone … We waited some time for the sound of her horse’s hoofs, for she had to traverse the whole breadth of the island on her errand of mercy. There was a throng of fair ladies present, but … there was no more sweet and intellectual face than that of the young Princess. Her duties were long and must have been fatiguing, but they were done gracefully and well.’

  The writer also remembered standing with a young lady by his side, when Louise passed by; the princess ‘gave us a gracious salutation and a courteous glance of her candid eyes. It was but a trifle, yet one which we valued and treasured.’

  Louise was determined to be taken seriously as an artist and continued her studies, despite the demands of her engagement. In the same year in which she would be married, she exhibited at the Old Bond Street Gallery of the British Institution. It was an exhibition held on behalf of the ‘destitute widows and orphans of Germans killed in the war’. Other artists and writers recorded the occasion of the royal wedding. The poet Robert Buchanan published a book entitled The Land of Lorne which he dedicated, with her permission, to Princess Louise.4

  In the final months of 1870, the Franco-Prussian War had escalated, with terrifying rapidity, when the Prussians marched on Paris. After months of bloody fighting, the Prussians crowned their kaiser as Emperor of France and took control of the capital city. This became known as the Siege of Paris. Parisians suffered, became racked with diseases and starved in their thousands. Famous tales were told of the animals in the royal menagerie being slaughtered and eaten. Daring balloonists attempted to escape by air and specially trained pigeons were released, bearing desperate letters to the outside world, known as the ‘pigeon post’. The Siege of Paris turned even those who had formerly supported Prussia into staunch sympathisers with the French. The people of Britain were incensed that their Princess Royal was married to the son of the warmongering Prussian Emperor. Queen Victoria wrote about her people’s fury with Prussia to Vicky’s motherin-law. It is a diplomatically worded letter – ostensibly the queen appears to be offering Prussia her sympathy – but she is actually warning the Prussians how much they are now disliked overseas. The Franco-Prussian War, which ended formally in May 1871, had turned Princess Louise’s wedding, and her choice of husband, into an act of patriotism.

  CHAPTER 12

  ‘The most popular act of my reign’

  Mr R.D. Blackmore, who died on Saturday last, had a hard struggle as a writer in the early days. His Lorna Doone … was rejected by no less than eighteen publishers. When Princess Louise … was married to the Marquis of Lorne, the public confused the names of Lorne and Lorna, to the benefit of the author, and the book began to sell at once.

  The Era, 27 January 1900

  In a letter to Vicky, Queen Victoria claimed that her announcement of Louise’s marriage was ‘the most popular act of my reign’. The newspapers concurred, with a journalist for the Newcastle Guardian writing that ‘a feeling of satisfaction pervaded the country … that at last a stop was put to the practice of handing over our Princesses to petty German princelings’. The young princess’s ‘love match’ to a minor Scottish peer became a vitally important exercise in public relations, not least because the queen’s advisors were aware of the increasingly hostile feelings of a large sector of the British public towards the monarch. In Scotland, it was said that anyone with the surname Campbell or with any connection at all to the Clan Campbell was now allying themselves with the Argyll family and claiming kinship with the princess. The people of Balmoral sent Louise a necklace as a wedding gift, proud that she was marrying one of their country’s sons. Her thank-you letter was reported in the newspapers:

  I am deeply touched by your having so kindly thought of me on this occasion, and given me such a beautiful present. I thank you from my heart for it, and shall ever treasure it amongst my most valued gifts as coming from kind friends who will be associated in my thoughts with dear Balmoral, and who have known me from my childhood. Though I may no longer be so frequent amongst you as heretofore, I shall think of you often in my own new Highland home.

  The royal wedding of 1871 was a bright spot in an extremely difficult year – although there were many republicans who were irate that the country was about to be subjected to yet another ‘beggar’ on the public purse. When the queen went to Parliament to ask not only for a marriage dowry for Louise but for an annuity for Prince
Arthur, it was widely remarked upon that she only took any interest in the running of the country when she wanted money for her family. There was a great deal of opposition to both requests, and The Spectator published an irritable article in which it queried why people were against the princess’s dowry:

  There is something very perplexing, and to us at least not a little irritating, in the sudden outbreak of popular feeling against the marriage of the Princess Louise, an outbreak so bitter that it may yet provoke a discreditable scene in the House of Commons … The subject is as embarrassing as the Permissive Bill, or the Contagious Diseases Act … What has the clever Princess done, or what is she about to do, that she should be treated with this exceeding discourtesy?

  In constitutional terms, the wedding was not only controversial because it divided the royal family, it was the first marriage of a royal to a commoner since 1515. Louise might be marrying a marquess whose father was the 8th Duke of Argyll and whose mother was the daughter of the 2nd Duke of Sutherland, but her husband-to-be was still considered a commoner.

  The Marquess of Lorne was a fascinating character whom many rumours surround, including that he had inherited a family gift of ‘second sight’. Contemporary reports, in newspapers and letters, stressed that this was a romantic love match – and that was what the public wanted to hear. A popular cartoon in Punch at the time of their engagement showed the couple, with Lorne dressed in a kilt, looking at hordes of would-be suitors for the princess’s hand. All the suitors wear Prussian or German army uniforms. The caption reads ‘A (Real) German Defeat’. Engagement photographs appeared in newspapers and magazines and The Graphic commissioned portraits of the couple, which Louise and Lorne sat for, reproduced in a special ‘wedding edition’. Wedding presents were sent from all over the empire, from lovingly crafted handmade items to jewel-encrusted regal gifts. The Mayor of Windsor was invited to hand over his gift in person: the people of Windsor gave the princess a diamond bracelet. The wedding preparations were not to be without political incident – Louise received a petition from ‘the Ladies of Ireland’ requesting her to intercede with the queen on their behalf to try and secure the release and pardon of Irish political prisoners.