Queen Victoria's Mysterious Daughter

by Lucinda Hawksley

  Henry photographed as a child, with a border possibly painted by Princess Louise, and in his army uniform.

  Louise posed for the society photographer Alexander Bassano several times. This photograph dates from the early 1880s and emphasises the princess’s role as a leader of fashion.

  During their early married life, images of Louise and Lorne appeared on memorabilia all over the English-speaking world. People could not get enough of the beautiful princess and her handsome husband.

  When Princess Louise married the Marquess of Lorne, she was the first member of the British royal family to marry a ‘commoner’ since 1515.

  The media and the public were thrilled by Princess Louise’s choice of a British husband. The newspapers were full of articles claiming that this was a romantic love match.

  Louise found her new Canadian home dark and oppressive, so she began decorating it. This was the door to her boudoir, which she painted with apple blossoms in a Japanese-style.

  Louise was immediately popular in Canada and quickly became renowned for her fashion sense.

  Lorne loved his years in Canada and delighted in the freedom he could enjoy whilst in a different continent from his motherin-law.

  A few years after leaving Canada, Louise was commissioned to sculpt a statue of her mother to be erected in Montreal.

  Prince Albert instilled in all his children a strong sense of social responsibility. Until the end of her life Princess Louise took her duties very seriously, tirelessly raising funds and awareness for hospitals, schools and other important causes.

  Shortly after her marriage, the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders became known as Princess Louise’s regiment. She designed their new regimental badge and took an active interest in their training and activities.

  Philip de László was welcomed into London’s artistic community, after his arrival from Vienna in 1907. He painted this portrait of Princess Louise in 1915, a year after the death of her husband, wearing mourning.

  Notes

  Introduction: How it all began

  1. Richmond’s comment varies depending on the source. A more sanitised version claims he said ‘Tell her to go to the devil.’

  Prologue: A celebrity comes to Liverpool

  1. A Canadian flag might seem more fitting, but the newspapers report that it was American.

  Chapter 1: Born in the year of revolution

  1. There are suggestions that the Duke of Kent was not Victoria’s biological father because of the presence of haemophilia in the royal family, which apparently began with Queen Victoria, who passed it on to her children. It has led generations of historians and geneticists to claim that Victoria’s real father must have been someone whose family was cursed with haemophilia. For this reason, there were rumours that her mother’s close advisor, Sir John Conroy, could have been her father. Other medical experts, however, point out that the disease can be acquired through a mutated gene and that Victoria could have been legitimate and have become a carrier in this way. Had she been illegitimate, Victoria would have had no legal right to the British throne.

  2. In this instance, ‘sponsors’ means ‘godparents’.

  3. His titles would be Duke of Edinburgh and 3rd Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (his father’s home).

  4. Later he became Duke of Connaught and Strathearn.

  5. By the time of Prince Leopold’s birth, Dr Snow was one of the most famous medical men in Britain. He was from a non-medical background – the son of a Yorkshire farmer – but through intelligence and research he changed history and the medical profession. In addition to being a pioneer of anaesthesia, he was the first person to identify the cause of cholera (a very common disease in Britain at the time), saving millions of lives.

  Chapter 2: A royal education

  1. Sass’s school was considered the preparatory training for the Royal Academy. It had been established, across the road from the British Museum, in 1818.

  2. Corbould died in 1905, and in the months before his death Princess Louise was one of his most regular visitors, taking him tempting foods to encourage him to eat. Corbould then lived on Victoria Road in Kensington, an artistic area of London not far from Edward Burne-Jones’s house and studio and on the same road as the artists Carlo and Kate Perugini (the younger daughter of Charles Dickens).

  3. This painting is owned by the Tate Britain.

  4. This painting can be viewed in the National Portrait Gallery in London.

  5. Lady Augusta Bruce was the sister of Bertie’s governor, Robert Bruce.

  Chapter 3: In the shadow of her siblings

  1. Wilhelm’s birth was difficult and agonising. Queen Victoria related that the Prussian doctors had given up on Vicky and her baby. It was the Scottish doctor, whom the queen had insisted be present, who had the presence of mind to be able to save them both. As a consequence of the birth, Wilhelm’s left arm was permanently paralysed (probably as the result of Erb-Duchenne palsy). This injury would cause many psychological problems for the future kaiser and directly affected relationships in the royal family.

  Chapter 4: An Annus Horribilis

  1. Modern diagnoses include Crohn’s Disease and cancer. Although Crohn’s Disease itself is not normally fatal it was little understood in the nineteenth century and complications arising from the disease could kill.

  2. Great Expectations was published in instalments from 1860 to 1861.

  Chapter 5: The first sculpture

  1. A few days after Bertie’s wedding, when Vicky wrote to her mother about how homesick she was, her irritated mother responded ‘[your] unbounded love for every thing English I own I can’t share … when you write to Bertie and Affie don’t write with frantic adoration of the Navy and all English feelings – for our sole object is to smooth that down and to Germanise them!’

  2. The Clique was founded in the 1830s by artists studying at the Royal Academy and included Richard Dadd (a brilliant artist fated to be confined to a prison asylum after brutally murdering his father), William Powell Frith, Augustus Egg, John Phillip, Alfred Elmore and Henry Nelson O’Neil. At their weekly meetings they would discuss and study art, all drawing the same subject or object then critiquing one another’s work.

  3. It may seem strange that Lord Gower should make an allusion to the executed Marie-Antoinette, but he was working on a biography of the French queen.

  4. Mary and Thomas Thornycroft had seven children. Their daughter Alyce and their son William Hamo Thornycroft both became professional sculptors, with William being one of the most important members of the ‘New Sculpture’ movement of the late nineteenth century. Another of their daughters, Theresa, was a talented painter (and the mother of the poet Siegfried Sassoon).

  5. Henry Ponsonby served in the royal household for most of Louise’s life. He was Prince Albert’s equerry from 1856 until the prince’s death; extra equerry to the queen after her husband’s death, and, from 1870, the queen’s private secretary.

  6. General Grey had been equerry-in-waiting to the queen when as she attained the throne. When she married Prince Albert, Grey became his private secretary. After Albert’s death, he became private secretary to the queen, until his own sudden death in 1870. He was replaced by Henry Ponsonby, who remained private secretary until 1895.

  7. Bertie’s son and heir was fated to die prematurely at the age of 28. In the 1960s rumours emerged that he had been Jack the Ripper – despite evidence proving that he was actually in Scotland when at least two of the murders were carried out. The rumours persist.

  8. In his book Royal Maladies, Dr Alan R. Rushton argues that if Louise had developed tubercular meningitis she would not have survived, nor would her recovery have progressed as it did.

  Chapter 6: What really happened with Walter Stirling?

  1. The mourning was not over, however, and the family were made to honour not only the anniversary of Albert’s death every December, but the anniversary of the queen’s mother’s death in March.

  2. Sir Thomas
Biddulph, Keeper of the Privy Purse.

  3. In 1875, Walter Stirling married Lady Clifden, a cousin of the Marquess of Lorne (Princess Louise’s husband).

  Chapter 8: An art student at last

  1. It is interesting to note that the Reverend Duckworth was amongst the party, in his capacity both as Leopold’s tutor and as a minister who often held private church services for the family during the holiday. His inclusion makes it even less likely that he was the father of Louise’s baby.

  2. In a letter dated 17 May 1875, the flirtatious Prince Arthur wrote to Louise about how much he had enjoyed meeting ‘that Miss Montalbert (I don’t know if that is the right way to spell it) … she is so clever and so pleasant in every way’. He asked Louise to take him to the art school one day, so that he could see her friend’s work.

  Chapter 9: Falling in love with the Cult of Beauty

  1. Until 1854, Japan had been closed off from the rest of the world for over 200 years, so when its ports were reopened and it began trading again, artists were enthralled by the artistic styles and treasures that began to appear.

  2. Boehm also worked in other media, including plaster, bronze and marble.

  3. This bust of John Brown is reportedly one of the items that King Edward VII ordered to be destroyed when he came to the throne. Elizabeth Longford claims he ordered it to be ‘smashed up’.

  Chapter 10: The people’s princess

  1. Lady Augusta Bruce was now Lady Augusta Stanley, the wife of Dean Stanley, who was the Dean of Westminster Abbey.

  2. Ironically, Queen Victoria meddled perpetually in politics, most obviously in her support for the Conservative leader Benjamin Disraeli, over his rival, Liberal leader, William Ewart Gladstone.

  3. An Act of Parliament was passed in 1876.

  Chapter 11: A controversial betrothal

  1. The Duke was the head of the Campbell clan.

  2. William Johnson later changed his name to William Cory and left the teaching profession.

  3. Although he was known as the Marquess of Lorne and would become the Duke of Argyll, his family were also part of the Campbell clan.

  4. Later that year, Buchanan would publish a now-famous and scathing review of the poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, entitled ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’, in which he also criticised the works of Rossetti’s friend Algernon Charles Swinburne. What Buchanan did not know would have made an even more sensational story – seven years after the death of his wife, the model Lizzie Siddal, Rossetti had retrieved the poems of which Buchanan so disapproved from her secretly exhumed coffin.

  Chapter 12: ‘The most popular act of my reign’

  1. Another story that featured prominently in the papers in the run-up to the wedding concerned an earthquake that affected much of northern England and whose tremors were felt in the Channel Islands.

  2. In 2009, a slice of Louise and Lorne’s wedding cake went on sale at an auction in the UK. It was described as one inch thick and still in its original parchment wrapper. It was suggested that whoever bought it should not eat it.

  3. The National Portrait Gallery owns a carte-de-visite photograph of Princess Louise, taken by the fashionable photographers Hills & Saunders in the mid-1860s. Louise stands behind a chair, on which is a small terrier – the dog is standing contentedly on its hind legs while Louise holds its front paws. It seems likely this dog was Frisky.

  Chapter 13: A battle for independence

  1. Among the artists who lived in England during the war were Claude Monet, who would continue to be inspired by London for decades to come, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley and Charles-François Daubigny.

  2. The palace, then as now, was divided into multiple apartments, which were allotted to members of the royal family.

  3. Sadly, Princess Louise’s studio was dismantled after her death, when the palace and its gardens were being remodelled. Princess Louise’s apartments and garden were being divided in two, and the studio was considered a hindrance to the division.

  4. A good example of a ‘north light window’ at an artist’s studio almost contemporary to that of Princess Louise’s can still be seen on the house once lived in by the artist Marcus Stone at 8 Melbury Road, a short walk from Kensington Palace.

  5. Walter Jekyll was a friend of Robert Louis Stevenson, who used his friend’s surname in one of his most famous books, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886).

  6. The brother of the Arctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton. Frank was known to be gay, and believed to be a criminal involved in the theft of the Irish Crown Jewels in 1907. According to rumours, Louise’s brother, by then King Edward VII, suppressed the investigation of the theft in order to protect Louise and Lorne, Shackleton and others of his friends from being implemented in the scandal.

  Chapter 14: Politics and Aestheticism

  1. An uncle of Sir Coutts Lindsay.

  2. Lorne’s pyschic abilities were not always so finely honed. One Christmas, after reading a verse that came out of a cracker, he became obsessed with the morbid belief that he was going to die at the age of sixty. For years, he would tell everyone that he had a presentiment about his death. When he lived beyond his sixtieth birthday, he quickly changed his ‘prediction’ to the age of seventy.

  Chapter 15: The first year in Canada

  1. The Times, 27 November 1878

  2. Although sections of the line had been opened some years earlier, the railway was not finished until 1876, two years before Louise and Lorne’s arrival in Canada. The Inter-Colonial Railway spanned over 700 miles.

  3. According to Matthew Dennison, Princess Beatrice’s biographer, Bertie began to think that Alice’s widower, Prince Louis of Hesse, would be a good husband for Beatrice. As such he became a fervent supporter of the Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Marriage Act, currently going through Parliament and supported by, amongst others, the Pre-Raphaelite artist William Holman Hunt (who had been forced to marry his dead wife’s sister in Italy as their marriage was considered illegal in England).

  4. In 1880, the Royal Military Academy was presented with a bust of the Prince Imperial to be displayed alongside Louise’s bust of Prince Arthur.

  5. In his book Painting in Canada, J. Russell Harper discusses the squabbling that marred the founding of the Academy: ‘The new academy was born in a “marvellous amount of bitterness and bad language; half the artists are ready just now to choke the other half with their paint brushes”.’

  6. Shoumatoff also notes, sadly, that Louise’s love for the area was the cause of one of the greatest problems for the Micmac tribe in the future. She and Lorne built a ‘fancy fishing camp’ (known as Lorne Cottage) and as a result the salmon in that part of the river became the property of the Governor-General. This meant that, during all succeeding governor-generalships, the tribe was forbidden to fish there. ‘Many departed for factory towns in New England,’ wrote Shoumatoff in 2006. ‘The bottom fell out of their culture, and they remain deeply demoralized and marginalized to this day. While I was there, the chief’s teenage daughter killed herself.’

  Chapter 16: A marriage lived in different continents

  1. Just over a week after Leopold’s wedding, the country was shocked by the news of the Phoenix Park murders in Ireland – one of the victims was a cousin of Lorne. The queen blamed Gladstone for the tragedy.

  2. Wilde’s first male lover was the poet Robert (‘Robbie’) Ross, who remained his loyal friend throughout all the miserable times Wilde was forced to endure. Ross later became his literary executor. Their relationship began in the late 1880s, following the birth of Wilde’s two sons with Constance.

  3. This was the expression used by David Duff; he showed the manuscript of his book to Princess Louise at the end of her life and she approved it.

  Chapter 17: Escaping the Fenians in Bermuda

  1. It was the menswear buyer for the Trimingham Brothers shop who invented the now-famous Bermuda shorts – which were based on British military shorts – and introduced them
into the store.

  2. The house burned down in 1931. The only part that survives today is the servants’ house, a two-storey flat-roofed house separate from the main building.

  3. Interview with the sculptor Andrew Trimingham and the former archivist for the Bermuda government John Adam in 2012.

  Chapter 18: Return to London – and tragedy

  1. Quoted by Albert Bigelow Paine in his 1907 biography of Mark Twain.

  Chapter 19: Keeping up appearances

  1. It was Beatrice who introduced the multicoloured ‘Battenberg cake’ to Britain.

  2. The station is now known as Euston Square.

  3. Louise, in common with all artists, knew Tite Street well. This was the street on which Edward Godwin created Whistler’s iconic studio – sadly destroyed in the 1960s and replaced with an example of deplorably bland architecture. It was also the street on which John Singer Sargent had his studio. Other notable residents included Frank Miles, close friend of Lord Ronnie Gower, and Constance and Oscar Wilde.

  Chapter 20: Scandal amongst the Campbells

  1. The family has never been immune from public scandal. In the 1960s, the divorce case of the 11th Duke of Argyll and his wife Margaret was all over the newspapers. Photographs had been published of her performing sex acts on an unidentified man; although both she and the man were photographed without their faces being seen, the duchess was identifiable by her distinctive necklace. It was rumoured that either the ‘headless man’ (as he became known in the papers) or the man who took the photograph was the actor Douglas Fairbanks Junior.

  2. When Lady Mordaunt gave birth to a daughter who was discovered to be blind, she was so distraught she decided she was being punished for committing adultery. She confessed her affairs to her husband and amongst the men she claimed she had ‘done very wrong with … often and in open day’ was the Prince of Wales. Her husband, Sir Charles Mordaunt, filed for divorce and Bertie was called to attend, as a witness to her defence. Despite having sent her letters and being known to have called on her while her husband was out, Bertie was found innocent of having committed adultery with her. Lady Mordaunt, aged just 28, was ruled insane and committed to an asylum for the rest of her life.