A Magnificent Obsession: The Death That Changed the Monarchy
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Nevertheless The Early Years of the Prince Consort was an overnight success when Victoria agreed to its publication for general consumption; so much so that within two days of it going on sale in July 1867 not a copy of Smith & Elder’s original print run of 5,000 was to be had in Printers’ Row, home then to the British publishing industry. A second edition of 7,000 was immediately ordered, and a third shortly afterwards. An American edition and numerous translations followed, and soon it was announced that future volumes covering the rest of the Prince’s life would be undertaken not by Grey, who was too overburdened by work, but by the Scottish scholar and German translator, Theodore Martin.
Predictably, the level of sycophantic review of The Early Years matched the hagiography of the original. Copious quotations from the book appeared across the press; The Early Years, it was asserted, provided the nation with a ‘picture of purity, of self devotion to the claims of duty, of chivalric endurance of obloquy – in a word, of thorough high mindedness in every sense’.3The Quarterly Review went to extravagant excess in bolstering the inviolability of Albert’s ‘imperishable reputation’. Spanning twenty-three pages, its exhaustive and adulatory review commended Grey for his discretion as the Queen’s amanuensis in ‘thread[ing] together the pearls intrusted to him’, adding that ‘though the threading is his, the pearls are the gift to us of a higher hand’. In short, the book was an example of ‘the Sovereign casting herself in her speechless grief upon the sympathy of her people’. Such emotive language of course drew the expected loyal response.4Elsewhere, the reviewer of the Medical Times and Gazette, while lauding ‘the overwhelming affection of the wife’ as demonstrated in the book, took this opportunity to suggest that it ‘explains her Majesty’s present position – a nervous system thoroughly out of gear’ – the nearest any published observation on the Queen’s state of mind had come to an overt assertion of mental depression. It also provided a typical Victorian circumlocution on her female frailties: ‘If we have a queen, we must be content to bear the peculiarities of her sex, even though some of its distinctive virtues may be felt to have become, by excess, somewhat of defects.’5
Victoria’s intention of producing edifying memorials to Albert for the benefit of her family did not stop with The Early Years. At the end of 1867, at a time when she was anxious to defend her favouritism for John Brown and all things Scottish, she was prevailed on by the Dean of Windsor and others to actually publish something of her own: the journals of her life at Balmoral. The Dean had thought their ‘simplicity’ and ‘kindly feelings’ might do ‘so much good’ to Victoria’s flagging reputation, but having allowed their private circulation in the family already, she had had no intention of them being published.6The success of Grey’s biography, plus a desire to circumvent extracts from the Balmoral journals appearing in garbled and pirated form, persuaded her to agree. At a time of gathering crisis, they proved to be the perfect palliative. If the Queen would not make herself visible to her public, then she could at least lift something of the veil hiding her from view, vicariously, through her Highland journals. It was an unprecedented royal act, the only previous sovereign to have published his own opinions in any shape or form having been King James I with his treatises on monarchy, and his famous and idiosyncratic swipe at smoking, ‘A Counterblaste to Tobacco’ of 1604.
From the outset Queen Victoria was under no illusions about her creative gifts, modestly protesting that the journals were mere ‘homely’ descriptions of her outings in and around Balmoral – which indeed they were. That did not deter her, however, from sending a copy to Charles Dickens, ‘from the humblest of writers to one of the greatest’.7In Victoria’s case it was precisely the book’s intrinsic qualities of simple sentiment and mundanity that proved to be pure marketing gold. Arthur Helps was once more recruited as editor and did his tactful best, as unobtrusively as possible, to eradicate some of the Queen’s lapses in grammar, her repetition and use of colloquialisms and slang, as well as expunging some of her more excessive underlining. The published edition that appeared early in January 1868 was handsome to look at, bound in moss-green leather with gold tooling; a large quarto edition that followed a year later was illustrated, in addition to the original engravings, with some of Victoria’s own charming watercolours of Scotland. Entitled Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands, from 1848 to 1861, the book was dedicated, of course, ‘to the dear memory of him who made the life of the writer bright and happy’, its every page bearing the stamp of the husband who had inspired it and of his wife’s inexhaustible love for him, in entries such as that for 13 October 1856:
Every year my heart becomes more fixed in this dear paradise, and so much more so now, that all has become my dearest Albert’s own creation, own work, own building, own laying out, as at Osborne; and his great taste, and the impress of his dear hand, has been stamped everywhere.8
But while the book celebrated Albert as archetypal Highland laird, out shooting, fishing, riding and walking, it was the book’s innate simplicity and warm-heartedness, and its projection of Victoria as an ordinary, private individual rather than as Queen, which immediately endeared it to the public and reviewers and restored something of her lost reputation. The British press in the main was disarmed by the lack of pretension of this ‘woman’s book’; to criticise its patently honest intentions would have been churlish, for here was something, in the estimation of The Times, that appealed ‘directly to the common heart’.9Like The Early Years, it was heaped with excessive, if not outlandish praise, with the reviewer of the Morning Post commending it as being one of the best things ever written.
Victoria was delighted with her reviews, which came thick and fast. ‘Newspapers shower in,’ she told Vicky on 22 January.10She had even indulged in a little manipulation in the process; having liked the review of The Early Years by the Scottish writer and literary critic Margaret Oliphant, and expecting her to be likewise favourably disposed to her own modest offering, Victoria specifically requested that Oliphant review Leaves. Oliphant was extremely reluctant to be sycophantic to order; ‘the queen’s book,’ she told a friend, ‘looks mighty like a little girl’s diary of travel and is innocent to the last degree. Would that it was consistent with loyalty to make fun of it.’11But she could not do so, for she was shrewd enough to know the value of the royal seal of approval and so she agreed, ‘on condition that I am not asked to tackle the holy Albert again’. Privately Oliphant had scant regard for Victoria’s amateurish literary endeavour and warned of the danger of her conceiving literary ambitions above her most limited ability. But she knew what the Queen could do for her, and so in her review in Blackwood’s Magazine in February 1868 she admired the book’s artlessness, spontaneity and simplicity, ensuring a generous fee of £100 and the award soon after of a Civil List pension, while keeping to herself her judgement on its literary merits.12
Other reviewers, however, could not restrain their excessive panegyrics to ‘the queen’s book’. ‘She has claimed her place in that great freemasonry which is open to all ranks and races – the freemasonry of those who believe still in love, chivalry, romance,’ proclaimed Fraser’s Magazine. It was ‘a homely book, made up of human nature’s daily food,’ extolled the North British Review.13The Daily Telegraph voiced the hope of many that in its very personal tone the book might in some way fill the void of the Queen’s absence from view, by drawing her public ‘nearer to the every-day life of a living queen than any persons not courtiers ever came before’; and indeed, the archetype of virtuous family life celebrated within the book was set in stark contrast to the artificiality of court life. ‘Thank god there are many thousand English homes like this,’ it went on, for the Queen had ‘no Royal monopoly of that pure light of household love which shines by so many English hearths’.14Only the Tomahawk dared to poke fun at the book’s crippling ordinariness: ‘the bubble about the queen walking about her royal parks in her coronation robes has long since been exploded,’ it remarked. Leaves had little to tell Vi
ctoria’s public, for ‘we all know that Her Majesty wears a bonnet in private life’.15
Some papers, such as the Chronicle, derided the endless references to Victoria’s humbler servants, particularly John Brown and the Queen’s detailing of ‘what he said of the Prince, how he got into the way of changing plates, how he brushed the queen’s boots, and wore the royal plaid, how fast he walks and how loudly he cheers, and how much rather she would trust him than the Duke of Athole at an awkward ford’. Such mundanities did not fit the public profile of a sovereign, but, the Chronicle added, it ‘would not have been made public if the public had not provoked it’.16Reynolds’s Newspaper as usual pulled no punches:
If this book were issued to the world as the work of Mrs Smith, instead of Victoria, Queen of England, it would not sell a dozen copies. People would wonder at how it came to pass that any sane individual could possibly be induced to publish so many pages of sheer and unmitigated twaddle. Readers would weary of the incessant laudation of her husband by the authoress, and, after throwing the book on one side, pronounce her an amiable monomaniac.17
But Reynolds’s could not hold back the tide of enthusiasm for Leaves from the Journal. Respectable middle England fell upon it, attracted by the engaging spontaneity of the Queen’s thought. With its warm depiction of the lower classes as embodied in her Scottish servants, Leaves was seen as an exemplary lesson in Christian goodness and social tolerance. Victoria knew that the book had no great literary pretensions, but felt that its popularity was a vindication of her own and Albert’s deeply held values; ‘the kind and proper feeling towards the poor and the servants will I hope do good, for it is very much needed in England among the higher classes’.18It was certainly a timely lesson in the virtues of the respectable lower middle classes, who admired the book and had been newly enfranchised with the passing of the 2nd Reform Bill. The aristocracy could not afford to be complacent about the voice of the common man, which was now demanding ever more to be heard, and Victoria was gratified that the public had appreciated how her book had got to the heart of ‘what is simple and right’. A Mrs Everett Green, writing on behalf of English wives and mothers everywhere, agreed, telling Arthur Helps that the book provided ‘a pattern for every home in the country’; after all, ‘a royal example is more potent than a volume of sermons’.19In assessing its impact, the diarist Alfred Munby made the shrewd observation that Leaves ‘may turn out to have been, by its very artlessness, a masterstroke of art’, and he was right. Arthur Helps felt the same; the book provided a ‘new bond of union’ between the Queen and her people at a time when it was sorely needed.20Victoria was thrilled with the critical response, but determined not to let it go to her head. She was, she told Theodore Martin, ‘much moved – deeply so – but not uplifted or “puffed up” by so much kindness, so much praise’.21
Not everyone, however, approved of the openness with which the Queen described her life at Balmoral; Lord Shaftesbury thought it entirely inappropriate that the monarch should reveal ‘all that she thinks and does in the innermost recesses of her heart and home’.22The reaction in high society was one of horror; the Queen’s otherwise devoted former ladies, Lady Augusta Stanley and Lady Lyttleton, had both been less than impressed with her uncritical admiration for all things Scottish, and Henry Ponsonby’s bluestocking wife Mary sniggered at the Queen’s rather amusing ‘literary line’.23While Stanley admitted that the journal was ‘nice’ and ‘very interesting’, and that it evoked many happy memories of her own years in the Queen’s service, she was also highly critical. Arthur Helps’s ‘apologetic introduction’ had made her ‘blood boil’; the frenzy of overpraise for this rather guileless book was excessive – as well as politically unfortunate. If the Queen had plumped for Ireland instead of Scotland as the object of her affections, Lady Augusta remarked, ‘the ecstasies and interests that would have grown up would have been just as great – and fenianism would never have existed’.24Stanley’s criticism like that of others in the royal household focused precisely on the element that had won it popular acclaim: the details of the lives of the lowliest of household servants at Balmoral, which gave the impression that the Queen considered them on the same footing as the aristocracy. An entire entry for 16 September 1850, accompanied by an engraving of him, sang the praises of John Brown as having ‘all the independence and elevated feelings peculiar to the Highland race’.25And the Queen’s children, who thought their mother’s book in poor taste, winced at her revelations of what, in their opinion, were far too many personal details. Ministers also worried that, with the decision having been made to exclude all comments relating to issues of public or political importance, it painted a false picture of the Queen’s life. With its endless descriptions of picnics, drives, expeditions and pony treks, as well as Albert’s voracious stag-hunting, it seemed to suggest that she and her consort had spent most of their time on holiday and at their leisure.
Nevertheless, the book was a huge critical and financial success and quickly became a best-seller, selling 80,000 during the first three months; by the end of the year it had sold 103,000 copies.26It was so in demand that ‘the circulating libraries ordered it by the ton’.27On 14 March the Queen wrote excitedly to Vicky that her book ‘had had such an extraordinary effect on the people’ that a cheap, 2s. 6d. edition was coming out to deal with pre-orders of 20,000, and another 10,000 were to be printed.28In all, it is estimated that the royalties on Leaves totalled around £30,000 and most of the profits were given to charity, in the form of educational bursaries for pupils of parish schools, including the local one at Crathie near Balmoral. The book turned out to be an even greater publishing success in the USA; a German translation appeared within a couple of months, as too did one into Gaelic; and many others followed, including Hindustani, and – at the Shah’s specific request – Persian.
The enormous success of Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands was, as a bemused Dean of Windsor observed, ‘a most curious turn of the wheel of fortune’, for the Queen’s book (in addition to General Grey’s Early Years) had given the monarchy a much-needed boost when its popularity was hitting an all-time low.29Victoria felt vindicated by the popular success of her idyllic portrait of family life with Albert and was convinced of ‘the good it will do the Throne’.30She was hugely relieved, for back in January she had had an anxious conversation with Theodore Martin in which she had urged him to find some way of letting the public know the truth about her withdrawal from public life. It was not her sorrow, great though it still was, she told him, that kept her secluded, but the ‘overwhelming amount of work and responsibility’:
From the hour she gets out of bed till she gets into it again there is work, work, work – letter-boxes, questions, etc., which are dreadfully exhausting – and if she had not comparative rest and quiet in the evening, she would most likely not be alive. Her brain is constantly overtaxed. Could this truth not be openly put before people?31
Martin himself had seen the piles of dispatch boxes requiring the Queen’s attention, but had advised against making any public statement on her workload, telling Victoria that her people ‘had entire trust in her doing what was best, and that she would appear in public whenever the necessity for doing so arose’.32Mercifully, the enthusiastic reception given to her book confirmed this. Scores of ‘beautiful and touching’ letters had poured in to the Queen, thanking her and ‘saying how much more than ever I shall be loved, now that I am known and understood’. Having opened a window on to her private life with Albert, she hoped the book would act as a surrogate for her lack of personal appearances, and that that would be an end to criticism.33Slipping back into a dangerous complacency, Victoria felt her confidence further boosted by the attentions of a new and adoring Prime Minister – Benjamin Disraeli.
In February 1868 the seventy-five-year-old Lord Derby had been forced to retire, to be replaced by Disraeli, who had first entered government as Chancellor of the Exchequer under Derby in 1852. Victoria’s first impression o
f him had been somewhat guarded; he seemed to her ‘most singular’, with his strongly Semitic looks and his shiny black ringlets. He ‘had a very bland manner’ and she thought his language ‘very flowery’, but after Albert died, Disraeli’s gift for soothing flattery had worked its magic on Victoria with his eulogies to the late Prince as a sovereign manqué and his tributes to Albert’s rich and cultivated mind.34In March 1863 Victoria, by now entirely won over, had deliberately passed over leading members of the aristocracy to grant seats to Disraeli and his wife at Bertie and Alix’s wedding. ‘The present man will do well,’ she now told Vicky with confidence, for her new Prime Minister seemed ‘particularly loyal and anxious to please me in every way’. But Vicky had heard differently; wasn’t Mr Disraeli ‘vain and ambitious’, she asked? That might be so, but all that mattered to Victoria was that he had always treated her well and had ‘all the right feelings for a Minister towards the Sovereign’; also to his credit was the fact that he had argued vigorously for additional government money for the Albert Memorial.35Disraeli’s first fawning meetings with the Queen in the spring of 1868 demonstrated to her that he was ‘full of poetry, romance and chivalry’ – the emotional touchstones on which she thrived. His devotion, his penchant for kissing her hand and his saccharine praise of her authorial gifts, with remarks such as ‘We authors ma’am’ (he himself being the author of fifteen novels), clearly struck a chord.36After being sent a copy of Leaves hot off the press, he had lauded its ‘essential charms’. ‘There is a freshness and fragrance like the heather amidst which it was written,’ he told Arthur Helps, words that no doubt found their way straight to the eager ears of the Queen.37In response she sent him primroses hand-picked by her at Osborne.