Queen Victoria's Mysterious Daughter

by Lucinda Hawksley

  The journalist Mrs Matthew Hall wrote gushingly about the intended marriage. This was to be a royal wedding to please the masses, and the message sent loud and clear to the nation was one that would not have looked out of place in a popular novel:

  Princess Louise, the fourth daughter of our gracious sovereign, whose name is at this time on the lip of every young lady in the United Kingdom, and who, being on the eve of her union with the object of her cherished attachment, engages the sympathy of all her sex … a perfect sympathy of taste in literature, music, and all the elegant accomplishments of refined life between the young couple, forms the basis of the ardent attachment which happily exists between them. So devoted, indeed, is the … Princess … that she has been known to declare should any unfavourable difficulty arise to prevent her union with the Marquis of Lorne, there was one thing she was determined upon: never to marry a foreign prince.

  Mrs Matthew Hall’s sentiment was rather different from that of Louise’s sister-in-law. Alix wrote to her sister Minnie about the engaged couple two weeks before the wedding: ‘She resents him like the devil, the poor man, I am sorry for both of them, and he is going to suffer for that!’ However, Alix also wrote unpresciently of Lorne, ‘He is in love with her voilà tout.’ If Bertie was aware of Lorne’s sexual preference for men, it was not something he had shared with his rather innocent and naïve wife. He had, however, managed to communicate his grave misgivings and Alix wrote with what she hoped was tact to her favourite sister-in-law: ‘Let me now wish you all possible happiness for your future, and may you never have cause to regret the step you have taken! God grant that the husband you have chosen may prove worthy of you my dearest Louise in every respect!’

  Three days before her wedding, Princess Louise celebrated her twenty-third birthday and awoke to a serenade by the band of the 2nd Life Guards. Bertie and Alix were conspicuously absent from her birthday dinner party that evening (although they arrived in time for the wedding). Louise and Lorne had already sat for their official wedding photographs and on the day before the wedding, excitement was generated by a local photographer who arrived to take pictures of the wedding cake. His photographs depict an enormous towering confection of white icing and sugar sculptures. Local newspapers were full of advertisements from businesses and warehouses announcing they would be closing early on the wedding day in honour of the royal couple.1

  On the day before the wedding the crowds waiting outside Windsor Castle were thrilled to see, amongst the army of workmen and decorators, the queen, Princess Beatrice and Princess Louise walking across the castle quadrangle to check on the decoration of the chapel; they were attended by the Duchess of Roxburghe and guarded by the looming figure of John Brown. Crowds also gathered at Windsor’s Great Western Railway station hoping to glimpse arriving royal guests, most notably the disgruntled Prince and Princess of Wales. The Morning Post made much of the fact that the bridegroom and his family passed unnoticed through the crowds into the queen’s waiting horse-drawn carriages.

  In the early hours of Tuesday 21 March 1871, many more people lined the streets of Windsor and Eton, to see the royal couple or their guests. The Morning Post reported ‘windows commanding a good view of the procession are fetching fabulous prices. The enterprising occupier of a house at the bottom of the Castle Hill has let one window for seven guineas.’ The marriage of Princess Louise and John George Edward Henry Douglas Sutherland Campbell took place at Windsor Castle’s St George’s Chapel. The chapel doors were opened at 11a.m. and the first guests soon started to arrive, with the ushers doing their best to ensure that everyone was seated according to rank and importance. The Pall Mall Gazette reported the progress of the wedding with bulletin-style accounts: ‘By noon nearly all the seats were filled, and the scene was then excessively grand. Every gentleman was in full uniform, and most of them glittered with gold lace and stars and orders. There was great diversity in the dresses of the ladies, both in material and colour, from velvet to gauzy silk.’

  At twenty past twelve, the music began and Helena and her husband Christian became the first members of the royal family to enter the chapel. The papers wrote avidly about the princesses’ dresses: Helena wore cerise pink silk decorated with diamonds, Beatrice pink satin, and Alix was resplendent in dark blue velvet with an impressive train (the newspapers forbore to mention that Alix was heavily pregnant yet again and that her rheumatic knee was so unreliable that she fell painfully while getting out of the carriage on her way into the chapel). The Duke of Argyll’s full Highland dress was remarked upon more often than his wife’s white satin dress and diamond tiara. At half past twelve, Lorne and his party entered the chapel. There had been a great deal of public discussion beforehand about whether the groom would wear a kilt; he did not – he wore the uniform of the Argyllshire Regiment of which he was honorary Colonel. Princess Louise, in an elaborate but artistic dress of white silk and satin, was escorted up the aisle by her mother and Bertie. The Illustrated London News published a drawing of the wedding, in which Louise and Lorne are almost overshadowed by their bevy of bridesmaids (wearing dresses and veils similar to the bride’s) who are in the centre of the picture holding up Louise’s magnificent train. To the side, apparently keeping a critical eye on the eight bridesmaids, is a stern-faced Queen Victoria. Louise designed both her bridal veil and the vivid red bouquets of roses carried by the bridesmaids.

  The wedding ceremony was performed by the Bishops of London and Winchester (with newspapermen waiting outside the gates in an attempt to hear the first eyewitness reports). Just before the entrance of the bride, a newly composed Wedding March, by Sir George Elvey, was played. Following the wedding ceremony, the queen invested her new son-in-law with the Order of the Thistle. The wedding breakfast was then served in the Oak Room at Windsor Castle. The wedding cake was reported to have taken three months to create, was five feet tall and ‘decorated with figures representing the Fine Arts, Science, Agriculture, and Commerce’.2 A special express train had been ordered for many of the guests to return to London from Windsor at 3.30p.m. The newly-weds left for Claremont House in Surrey, a beautiful Palladian mansion built in 1774 for Clive of India; its parkland had been landscaped by Sir John Vanbrugh, William Kent and Capability Brown. The house, once the home of the much-mourned Princess Charlotte, the illfated daughter of King George IV and Queen Caroline, had been a favourite place of the young Queen Victoria. Louise and Lorne left their remaining guests to enjoy what The Graphic described as ‘a grand dinner party … at the Castle in the evening, after which there was a concert in St George’s Hall’.

  On their way to begin their honeymoon at Claremont House, the couple drove through Old Windsor, where the people had erected triumphal arches and Louise, now the Marchioness of Lorne, made a speech and was presented with a bouquet. Lord Ronnie Gower wrote in his diary for that day:

  A family party met at Cliveden the previous day, and on the marriage morning drove over to Windsor. Percy and I were the two ‘supporters,’ to use the expression of etiquette at these royal ceremonies. The day was brilliant … Lorne went through the ordeal with admirable self-possession. The bride very pale, but handsome. The whole scene was superb, full of pomp, music, pageantry and sunshine … At four the newly-wedded pair left the castle … under a shower of rice, satin shoes, and a new broom that John Brown, in Highland fashion, threw after their carriage as it left the quadrangle for the station.

  Jane Ridley, Bertie’s biographer, commented on how shocked Alix was by Louise’s behaviour on the wedding day. Alix had expected her sister-in-law to be demure and overcome with nerves and emotion, but instead Louise talked and laughed with her friends, often ignoring royal protocol.

  All over the country, the queen’s subjects held parties, lavish dinners, bonfires, balls and firework displays to celebrate the wedding of their princess. On the evening of the wedding day, 7,000 singers (one huge choir formed from many visiting choirs) performed on stage at the Crystal Palace in honour of the royal wedding,
accompanied by the Crystal Palace Orchestra and an assembly of military bands. As with all royal weddings, the papers continued to print stories about the occasion long after the event. The Graphic published an illustrated guide to the presents, not only the lavish gifts given to the bride by her mother and by the Duke and Duchess of Argyll, but also a bracelet given to Louise by Lorne; it is a pretty and unusual design, which suggests he already understood her taste. The paper also showed the locket Louise gave to her bridesmaids (and which she had designed herself), a Celtic design bracelet given by the ‘People of Mull’ and the necklace and earrings ‘given by the Upper Servants and Tenantry of Balmoral’. The princess even received a present from ‘the Maidens of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland’ (a casket and beautifully decorated bible).

  For Louise, becoming a bride had made few discernible changes in her bid for freedom. Despite being married, the couple were still seldom alone. They were accompanied on their journey to Claremont House by upper servants and were greeted upon their arrival by two of Queen Victoria’s ‘spies’, Colonel McNeill and Lady Jane Churchill; one very welcome member of the honeymoon party was Louise’s pet dog, Frisky.3 Two days into the honeymoon, the couple prepared for a visit from the queen, who claimed she could not cope without her beloved daughter and longed for them to return to Windsor and the bosom of the royal family. It was already time for Louise to resume official duties, such as receiving the Emperor Napoleon, recently arrived from beleaguered France.

  At the end of March, just a few days after her wedding, Louise attended the opening of the Royal Albert Hall in South Kensington. Her fashionable white dress was the talk of the newspapers. In April, the couple set off for a proper honeymoon, taking the train to Dover and the boat to Ostend. Honeymooning in Europe was difficult with the war still raging and Louise knew it would be impossible to visit Vicky, but she had hoped to see Alice. The sisters met for the briefest of meetings in a railway station in Germany. Like many Victorian honeymoons, it was a strange journey. Louise was travelling with a man she barely knew and yet had pledged to spend her life with; it was an unsettling time, but also a time of great excitement. They travelled incognito as Lord and Lady Sundridge. The queen expected daily letters from her honeymooning daughter, but in this she was to be disappointed. The princess wrote regularly, but not every day: it was a small victory. Louise was determined to enjoy the independence of being a married woman.

  In Italy, the Lornes indulged their shared love of art and Louise was able to visit the places she had written about so longingly in her letters to Arthur a few years earlier. The couple visited galleries and bought works of art for their marital home. In Florence, Louise made friends with the woman arranged by the queen to be her ‘companion’, Lady Paget, wife of the British Minister (who noted that she was always having to remind the princess that they ought to get back to their husbands – Louise’s behaviour was not what she had expected from a honeymoon bride). At that date, Florence was home to a large population of British people; some went for the climate and their health, but many were there because it was so much more affordable to live in style in Italy. Louise and Lorne also visited Venice, a city that had inspired artists for centuries. Since John Ruskin had published The Stones of Venice in the 1850s, British artists and writers had been flocking to the city in even larger numbers than before. Whistler was amongst those who travelled regularly to Venice for inspiration. (In 1876 Louise would be amongst the elite few invited to see Whistler’s Venetian-inspired works.)

  Alice and Louise’s brief meeting took place as the Lornes travelled back to London, and Alice was pleased to see how well her sister was looking. The knee injury was no longer troubling her and she had experienced her first, heady taste of freedom. The queen did not want her daughters to see each other, she was worried that Alice, who was known for her directness and medical knowledge, would talk to Louise about gynaecological matters. The queen wrote to Louise:

  I would rather you had not met her so soon [after the wedding], for I know her curiosity and what is worse and what I hardly like to say of my own daughter, – I know her indelicacy and coarseness … Mary Teck, who is very nice in her feelings … told me she never was so shocked as she had been at the things Alice said to her!’ A few weeks later, the queen cautioned Louise again with the unintentionally amusing postscript: ‘Don’t let Alice pump you. Be very silent and cautious about your “interior”.

  The honeymoon journey seems to have been a success. There were many reasons why Louise and Lorne should have been compatible, not least because they shared the same Liberal politics. Lorne would become a Liberal MP and he and Louise shared an ideology: both wanted to improve the lot of Britain’s poorest people and longed for educational and health reform. They were also strong supporters of women’s suffrage – even at university, long before he met Louise, Lorne was renowned for his ‘feminist’ ideals, supporting women’s education and parodying those who tried to keep female scholars out. It is likely, however, that they had too much in common. Two days before the wedding, Lorne had written to his beloved ‘Aunt Dot’. He told her that he ‘felt rather sad as I turn from independence to – we know what!’ It is usually assumed that this meant sadness about being under the tyranny of his new motherin-law. Perhaps he wanted to make a Victorian joke about the wonders of being a bachelor, but it also seems likely that it reflects his sadness about being married at all and the need to live a lie. This would tally with Lord Ronnie’s comment in his diary that ‘Lorne went through the ordeal with admirable self-possession.’

  The rumours about Lorne’s sexuality have persisted throughout the decades. Officially sanctioned books claim that Lorne was perceived as a ‘ladies’ man’ by the local girls when he was growing up, and spurious claims were made that he had illegitimate children ‘all over the Highlands’, something that seems to have no basis in fact. In 1930 the diaries and letters of William Ewart Gladstone’s daughter, Mary, were published and in them she revealed she had had a romance with Lorne before he married Louise. This is sometimes claimed as proof that Lorne was not gay, but a ‘romance’ to a woman of Mary’s social status and era usually meant a flirtation and perhaps correspondence, not a sexual relationship. Within a short time of the ‘romance’, Mary’s diaries reveal she was uneasy about spending time alone with Lorne and felt ‘relieved’ when they were with other people.

  The inability to access the Argyll family’s archive means I have been unable to clarify anything about Lorne’s sexual behaviour before marriage (if there is anything left in the archive to reveal itself). A researcher attempting to write about Louise and Lorne in the 1970s told me that he was physically escorted out of the Argyll family archives by the then Duke of Argyll, after the researcher asked quite innocently if the archivist thought there was any truth to the rumour of Princess Louise having had an illegitimate baby. He had not yet touched upon the rumours about Lorne’s sexuality. He was not allowed back again.

  CHAPTER 13

  The battle for independence

  Our evening here consists in the Queen coming in to the drawing room for ten minutes or so and then we sit about and talk … [Lord Lorne] in his kilt and his belt studded with boars’ heads, the skiff of Lorne etc., and adorned with the thistle ribbon, talks to the strangers; the Duchess presides at the tea table and Lady Dufferin, Lady Churchill and a daughter. Louise gets a Presbyterian Minister on a sofa near her; another Minister sings songs. Campbell of Islay wanders about, joining in the song, or sipping his tea, and I sit with an enormous book of the Argyll letters since 1660 which Lorne lumps into my lap.

  Henry Ponsonby, letter to his wife, from Inveraray, 25 September 1875

  Louise worked tirelessly during her first year of marriage. In addition to being at the queen’s beck and call, she had her own public duties to perform, as the public wanted to see the royal bride and her handsome husband (as all the newspapers then described him). The queen, who was in Scotland when Louise moved into her new home in Lo
ndon, wrote officiously to her daughter: ‘Pray don’t rush about in London, as you always used to do! Visiting and going to exhibitions, shops and studios … Pray be prudent and reasonable. And don’t ever go out (when Lorne is not there) without some lady or other’. Louise ignored her mother, and what seems to be a badly veiled hint about not seeing Boehm alone, and enjoyed herself in London. She and Lorne had already realised the necessity of spending a great deal of time apart – which offended the queen, who wrote an angry letter to Lorne about how much she and Albert had longed to spend all their time together and saying that Lorne should never be happy when Louise was with her mother and he was elsewhere.

  As soon as possible, Louise and Lorne set off on their marriage tour, travelling around the country and visiting Ireland. Lord Ronnie recalled the day that Lorne brought his new wife ‘home’ to Scotland:

  I went to Inveraray to be present at the ‘Homecoming’ of Princess Louise. It rained all the time, as it always does at Inveraray, in torrents … The Princess seems already quite at home, and very cordial to all … Highland games go on all day long in spite of the deluge, and Highland jigs, flings, and dances are the order of the night.

  There was great excitement all around Inveraray and Louise was fêted. Twin girls who were born on the day the princess came to Inveraray were christened Louise and Lorne.