A Magnificent Obsession: The Death That Changed the Monarchy

by Helen Rappaport

  The narcissistic Disraeli had never easily won the admiration of other men, who had resolutely refused to take him seriously; there was just ‘too much tinsel’ about him, according to Lady Nevill, too much of the poser and dandy.38But he did have an extraordinary gift for winning the lifelong devotion of women, and soon proved to have a unique and winning way with his Queen, knowing full well that, in her case, the personal touch was all-important. Thanks to his charms and the warm public reception given to her book, Victoria’s mood that year greatly improved. In March she attended her first Drawing Room in London since her widowhood, followed by another in April; she reviewed the troops at Aldershot and in Windsor Home Park, attended the Royal Academy exhibition and a ‘breakfast’ at Buckingham Palace. As an admirer of Florence Nightingale, she agreed to lay the foundation stone for the new St Thomas’s Hospital, where Lucy Cavendish noted how she ‘went thro’ the ceremony with all her old grace and wonderful dignity, ending with several deep curtseys to the audience’. It was a ‘sight to see’, she wrote, confirming how well and cheerful the Queen now seemed: ‘really our little Queen in her deep black was not outshone even by the lovely, radiant Princess of Wales’.39

  However, Victoria continued to place very firm restrictions on more onerous public appearances, declining to open Parliament and continuing to resist being in London for more than a few days a year. She constantly complained of how exhausting and noisy she found it there – not to mention the terrible, dense yellow fog. But her spirits were clearly reviving: she started playing the piano again and sketching. She felt she was making a real effort, so she bridled at what she saw as the ‘shameless’ articles about her that continued to appear in some of the press, such as that in the Globe in May, which took her to task for preparing to disappear off to Balmoral while Parliament was in the midst of a crisis and Disraeli’s government seemed about to fall.40For no sooner had she begun to bask in the warm glow of her new Prime Minister’s flattery than in May the Conservative government lost the vote over Opposition leader William Gladstone’s resolution to disestablish the Irish Protestant Church. Disraeli offered to resign; loath to lose him, Victoria sought to dissolve Parliament instead, hoping that by going to the country the Tories would be returned in a general election later in the year. Disraeli, after all, was already showing ‘more consideration for my comfort than any of the preceding Prime Ministers since Sir Robert Peel and Lord Aberdeen’.41She fiercely resisted the pressures to shorten her visit to Balmoral, telling Disraeli that she would return to Windsor only if anything ‘very serious should render it necessary’, but that she was completely ‘done up’ by fatigue and worry.42Was not the whole week she had spent in London already that year enough to satisfy people?, she asked Theodore Martin, in a letter she sent enlisting his support and that of Arthur Helps in ensuring that no further swipes at her should follow in The Times and Telegraph.

  It all seemed a case of the lady doth protest too much, for Victoria knew full well that later that summer she was planning to go on holiday yet again – this time abroad, to Switzerland – and that further criticism was bound to follow. But nothing for now would induce her to change her plans; on 18 May she departed for Balmoral. It was a highly provocative act: two days later Delane of The Times rightly objected to the fact that during this most difficult time ‘the first person in the State, to whom recourse must be had in every momentous juncture, was hurrying at full speed from the neighbourhood of the capital to a remote Highland district, six hundred miles from her Ministry and Parliament’. The Queen, he pointed out, would be virtually incommunicado, and it was ‘an act of culpable neglect’ on the part of Mr Disraeli not to advise her against it.43The following day Denis Rearden, the MP for Athlone, submitted a question in the Commons for the Prime Minister as to whether, if the Queen’s health ‘appears to be so weak that she cannot live in England’, she might not best be advised to abdicate or establish a regency under the Prince of Wales.44A month previously a seditious placard had been put up in Pall Mall to the same effect. Constitutionally, only the government could put pressure on the Queen, but Disraeli had little power over her at this stage. Victoria was enraged and responded from Balmoral two days later, making the ultimate threat in a letter to Disraeli. She had no doubt that she might look well, but people had no idea how much she really suffered: ‘if the public will not take her – as she is – she must give all up – and give it up to the Prince of Wales’.45She felt totally justified in taking her two scheduled visits to Balmoral that year, which she did with Dr Jenner’s full encouragement. Jenner himself saw the Home Secretary soon afterwards and assured him of the Queen’s present state of agitation. Without rest he was convinced she would break down completely. Victoria was clearly most determined to have that holiday in Switzerland.

  The idea of going there had sprung from accounts Albert had sent her of his travels in Switzerland in 1837 before they married. She had long planned it, in secret, but was determined to go somewhere completely secluded, where ‘she can refuse all visitors and have complete quiet’. In the event, the compliant Disraeli made no objections and the Queen left England on 4 August 1868, ‘entirely on the recommendation of her physicians’, so the press were told.46She travelled under the rather transparent pseudonym of the Countess of Kent, with her three youngest children and a reduced entourage that included Dr Jenner and her favourite lady-in-waiting, Jane Churchill. Bringing up the rear came a disgruntled John Brown – who hated going abroad – following in a carriage full of all the Queen’s picnicking equipment and a few bottles of best Scottish malt. For the next month Victoria made her home at the Pension Wallace overlooking Lake Lucerne. Never since Albert’s death had she been so cheerful as during this holiday: talking animatedly and laughing at dinner and, despite the difficulty of her increasing weight and the terrible heat, taking sedate walks, drives and excursions to enjoy the view of mountains and glaciers. In Switzerland she was, for once, relieved of endless mournful reminders of Albert.

  Back in England on 11 September, she barely made her presence felt at Windsor before, three days later, heading straight for Balmoral. She was dismayed at the prospect of the imminent general election and the possible loss of Disraeli, who paid her a ten-day visit there; after which she turned her attention resolutely away from politics to disappear off to a new holiday retreat that she had had built at Glassalt Shiel at the northern end of Loch Muick. She and Albert had in the past enjoyed the use of a small cottage three miles away at the other end of the loch, at Altnagiuthasach, but the memories were too painful for Victoria ever to return there. And so she had built this small hunting lodge, nestled in a wild spot at the base of the bare, snow-covered screes up at the northern end, as her ‘first widow’s house’. With its ten rooms, including her own with its single bed, it was modest by royal standards, but it was her own special refuge, ‘not built by him or hallowed by his memory’. In October she held a house-warming there to which her servants were invited. Reels were danced and everyone drank ‘whisky-toddy’ toasts to the Queen’s health and happiness.47

  After almost two months at Balmoral, Queen Victoria finally arrived back at Windsor in time to regretfully say goodbye to the congenial Disraeli, whose government had been ousted by the Liberals in the general election. She was now obliged to welcome the dour Mr Gladstone as Prime Minister, a man who venerated her as Queen, but who, unlike Disraeli, had none of his gifts of flattery. Knowing this, the Dean of Windsor had advised Gladstone that he must treat his monarch with kid gloves: ‘you cannot show too much regard, gentleness, I might even say tenderness towards her,’ he had said, but when it came to it, Gladstone was a clodhopper in comparison with the swooning Disraeli.48Victoria was of course greatly inconvenienced by this changeover, but tried hard to like Gladstone at first. He seemed cordial and kind, but she soon came to dislike his heavy-handed manner and, worse, he talked too much. After thirty-one years on the throne she did not appreciate being lectured to by him. She missed Disraeli’s gossipy in
formality and charm; nor was she protected any longer by an apologist for her entrenched behaviour. As another year turned, there was no doubt in the mind of Lord Clarendon that the Queen was perfectly up to the job. ‘Eliza is roaring well and can do everything she likes and nothing she doesn’t,’ he told the Duchess of Manchester, using an irreverent nickname current in the royal household.49General Grey was in despair; his situation had become ‘intolerable’, he had told Disraeli; he had been on the brink of resigning and it was only Disraeli who had persuaded him to stay. 50He shared his apprehensions with Gladstone; it was clear to them both that the Queen had got it into her head that she was far less capable of fulfilling her duties than she really was, that she was playing the feminine-frailty card far too often. What had become of the young queen who had been so anxious to fulfil her duties, when first married, that she allowed herself only three days of honeymoon, insisting to Albert that ‘business can stop and wait for nothing’?51Seven years on from her husband’s death, business had stopped and waited for far too long.

  Grey had no doubts that they were dealing with a ‘royal malingerer’, but that ‘nothing will have any effect but a strong – even a peremptory tone’ with the Queen. Having convinced herself that she could not cope, she had become entrenched in a ‘long unchecked habit of self-indulgence that now makes it impossible for her, without some degree of nervous agitation, to give up, even for ten minutes, the gratification of a single inclination, or even whim’.52Her children, particularly the twenty-year-old Princess Louise – who had assumed the role of resident daughter-on-duty after Helena’s marriage in 1866 – were very worried about her continuing seclusion. In Louise’s view, neither her mother’s health nor her strength was ‘wanting’, as Victoria continued to insist. Grey found a new ally in Louise, who told him that she was ‘very decided as to the ability of the Queen to meet any fatigue, and is most indignant with Jenner for encouraging the Queen’s fancies about her health’.53As for her constant protestations about her volume of work, for all her claims to Theodore Martin, Grey of all people knew the true extent of the Queen’s workload. It was as follows: ‘In very short notes; in shorter interview, Her Majesty gives me her orders to “write fully” on this or that subject.’ Beyond reading the letters or dispatches that Grey placed in front of her, the Queen, in his view, had little else to do, other than ‘to approve of the draft which I submit to her’. The put-upon Grey felt that he was the unacknowledged one doing all the donkey work; the Queen only ‘exercised her brain or her pen’ on matters that affected ‘her own comfort’ and was happy to delegate the rest to him. ‘Pray dismiss from your mind any idea of there being any “weight of work” upon the Queen,’ he told Gladstone, adding, ‘and this, Princess Louise, emphatically repeats’. Her sister, Princess Helena, had by now come to the conclusion that the only way to get their mother to cooperate was to ‘put it plainly upon her duty as head of affairs, and above all, not use the “People say” argument’, which ‘exasperates Mama’.54

  Grey anticipated a fight to come as Gladstone weighed in with attempts to persuade Victoria to leave Balmoral early in the autumn of 1869 in order to fulfil an important public engagement – a visit to the city for the first time in eighteen years, to open first the newly built Blackfriars Bridge and then the Holborn Viaduct constructed over the old Fleet Valley, connecting Holborn Hill with Newgate Street. Victoria agreed, on condition that the whole thing would be dependent on the state of her fragile health on the day in question. The Times feared that the many loyal Londoners eagerly looking forward to seeing her might be disappointed. A pavilion and stands to take 4,000 people were erected on the bridge, but what were 4,000 tickets compared to the half a million or so that The Times anticipated would assemble out of a ‘natural yearning’ to see their monarch?55High winds and heavy rain the night before spoiled the street decorations and dampened spirits, but Saturday 6 November dawned fine as special trains brought thousands of people into the city for the occasion. Many more flocked to Paddington Station to see the Queen arrive by train at 11.30 a.m. before processing by carriage with an escort of Life Guards (carrying loaded revolvers in case of trouble from Fenians) across London, past Buckingham Palace and over Westminster Bridge to the Surrey side of the river. After Victoria had speedily declared Blackfriars Bridge open, the royal carriage crossed over to the City and on up to the viaduct above Farringdon Street where even greater crowds awaited her. Here John Delane was waiting to see events for himself, having been apprehensive of demonstrations in the wake of a string of recent Fenian outrages and arrests. ‘The cold intense, the show poor, but the loyalty great,’ he recorded of the event in his diary.56Victoria thought the day had gone well, and the enthusiasm had been ‘very great’, though as usual it had been ‘a hard trial’ for her.57But not everyone that day came to admire, and hissing had been heard from the crowd when her carriage had passed along the Strand.

  Victoria did not stay for the banquet given by the Lord Mayor at the Mansion House that evening, where her reply to the loyal address was read for her. Without being unduly overtaxed, she had left London on the royal train for Windsor by 1 p.m. Nevertheless, the Morning Post waxed lyrical on the magnanimous gesture she had that day bestowed on her adoring subjects. Her Majesty, it said, had ‘broken through the habits of her ordinary life’ to ‘come up from that Highland Home in which she finds so much tranquil pleasure and consolation, to make evident to her subjects practically the interest which she takes in every occurrence that contributes to their welfare or adds to their enjoyment’.58

  An hour and a half of the Queen’s time in the capital had, however, been a paltry gesture and did nothing to prevent the spectre of unpopularity from rising once more. Victoria as usual remained oblivious to it. ‘Nothing could be more successful than the progress and ceremony of Saturday,’ she told Theodore Martin. ‘The greatest enthusiasm prevailed, and the reception by countless thousands of all classes, especially in the City, was most loyal and gratifying – not a word, not a cry, that could offend any one.’ There would therefore, in her estimation, be no need for any public statement on the reasons for her continuing seclusion; the story she would eventually tell in Martin’s forthcoming life of Albert ‘should fully open the eyes of her people to the truth’.59

  Unfortunately, the first volume of The Life of the Prince Consort would not be published until 1874; meanwhile, early in 1870 the royal family was once more plunged into controversy, when Bertie, his reputation already plummeting thanks to his addiction to racing, gambling and clubbing, was called to give evidence in a scandalous divorce hearing. The petitioner, one of Bertie’s acquaintances, Sir Charles Mordaunt, had threatened to cite him as co-respondent along with two others, but in the end had petitioned for a divorce on the grounds that his wife was insane. Nevertheless Bertie, who had written some innocent letters to Lady Mordaunt, was subpoenaed as a witness by her counsel. In the witness box he denied all accusations of misconduct. The whole scandal was, for Victoria, ‘a painful, lowering thing’. She did not doubt Bertie’s innocence, but she despaired at his imprudence in his choice of friends and his repeated social indiscretions. As his mother, she closed ranks to protect him, but not without lecturing him on abandoning his frivolous lifestyle. ‘Thank goodness beloved Papa was not here to see it,’ she told Vicky; he would have ‘suffered dreadfully’ with the worry of it all.60The case had come at a time when the press were once more on the attack, and a broadside entitled ‘The coming K—’, parodying Bertie’s pleasure-seeking private life in the style of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, was doing the rounds. Echoes of the past dissolute behaviour of Bertie’s Georgian ancestors reverberated across the accounts of the trial, with talk once more of the cost of the royal family to the nation when they did little in return to earn it.

  Radical opinion in Britain, which had been on the rise since the agitation for the 2nd Reform Bill of 1866–7, had received a major boost in the summer of 1870 with the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, a confli
ct that had once again divided Victoria’s loyalties – between her friend, the French emperor Napoleon III, and her Prussian relatives. The war had ended in the defeat of the French at Sedan in September and the flight of the Emperor into exile. The establishment of the Third Republic in France after the romantic heroics of the Paris Commune had prompted a surge in the political left in Britain, as middle-class radicals, trade unionists and socialist-minded politicians gathered at a series of meetings at which calls were made for Queen Victoria to be deposed. Having let go of virtually all her ceremonial duties, she was accused of accruing large amounts from the Civil List for her own private use, while the Prince of Wales had been busy doing little but amass a pile of debts. The radical National Reformer argued that it ‘seems proved by the experience of the last nine or ten years that the country can do quite well without a monarchy’.61The Republican – the organ of the Land and Labour League – equalled it, calling for social justice and an end to an oppressive government that cared nothing for the poor.62Republican clubs were springing up in major cities across the country: Aberdeen, Birmingham, Cambridge, Cardiff, London, Norwich and Plymouth, and with them came the increasing urgency, in Gladstone’s mind, of addressing ‘The Royalty Question’ once and for all.63The fund of public goodwill for the monarchy was drying up and he did not see ‘from whence it is to be replenished as matters go now’. ‘To speak in rude and general terms,’ he told Lord Granville in early December 1870, ‘The Queen is invisible, and the Prince of Wales is not respected.’64If Victoria could not be coaxed out, then all he could do was campaign for better ways of showing the royal family ‘in the visible discharge of public duty’. He therefore argued for a greater and more responsible role for the Prince of Wales, urging the Queen that Bertie be based in Ireland for half the year, as permanent Viceroy. Victoria was ruthlessly dismissive of the suggestion: the weather was awful, the damp climate would be bad for Bertie’s health and the expenditure of money on royal public duties in Ireland would be a waste of time and money. As far as she was concerned, ‘Scotland and England deserved it much more.’65