A Magnificent Obsession: The Death That Changed the Monarchy

by Helen Rappaport

  Ensconced at Windsor, Queen Victoria remained deaf to the warnings not far away in the heart of London. On 18 December a demonstration was called by the International Democratic Association in Trafalgar Square, at which up to 3,000 men and boys converged, carrying banners decorated with French republican mottoes and devices as well as the chillingly familiar red cap of liberty, ‘to acknowledge the struggle of the people of France against despotism’ and offer their full support for the new Republic, which the British government had yet to recognise. The aggression of Victoria’s Prussian relatives in the recent war against France had further fuelled popular support for the republican spirit in France. Reynolds’s Newspaper took advantage in its reporting to see the rally in Trafalgar Square as a sign of the stirring of allegiance among the working classes to ‘the republican form of government’; it gave the lie to the supposedly monarchical loyalties of the British people that Victoria had for so long been cushioned by in her retreat from public view. ‘Dynastic considerations are paralyzing the best energies of England, and rendering us the laughing stock of the whole world,’ it warned. ‘Englishmen are not the servile, grovelling idolaters of royalties and aristocracies our contemporaries delight in depicting them.’66

  On a mild, calm afternoon in October 1870 diarist Arthur Munby had been out taking a stroll in Kensington Gardens. ‘Close by was the gilded pinnacle of the Prince Consort’s Monument, now all but finished,’ he noted, but he was sanguine about its future, concluding that ‘a hundred years hence’ it would be looked upon as a ‘tawdry yet interesting memento of an extinct monarchy’.67Earlier that summer, voicing the gathering anxieties of all his siblings, Bertie had tried to encourage his mother to show herself more to her people: ‘If you sometimes came to London from Windsor and then drove for an hour in the Park (where there is no noise), the people would be overjoyed,’ he had urged her, adding a sobering warning. ‘We live in radical times, and the more People see the Sovereign the better it is for the People and the Country.’68In this view Bertie had the backing of Victoria’s new Private Secretary, Henry Ponsonby, the exhausted and demoralised General Grey having collapsed and died on 26 March. The Prince of Wales would soon be thirty, but still had no useful ceremonial role; his mother, as she aged, was becoming increasingly intractable. With republicanism in Britain on the rise, a renewed and far more serious assault on the Queen’s continuing seclusion was about to be launched.

  Chapter Fourteen

  ‘Heaven Has Sent Us This Dispensation to Save Us’

  After less than a year in his new post as Private Secretary to the Queen, Henry Ponsonby was still very much feeling his way when, in 1871, the monarchy was confronted with its most serious crisis yet. The Queen’s invisibility was not just a frustration to her public and her ministers; it extended to her staff and created many difficulties for Ponsonby in his job. Queen Victoria did not volunteer him much of her personal time, frequently sending scribbled notes rather than issuing verbal instructions, and not even calling for him when she dealt with her official dispatch boxes. The expectation of at least being solicited for advice had rapidly faded, and Ponsonby’s role was often reduced to the farcical sending of the same papers back and forth, via footmen, to the Queen a few rooms away. He already had the distinct impression that his monarch did not work as hard as she claimed, despite the sycophantic protection of Dr Jenner. The perception of some, like Disraeli, that she worked tirelessly on Foreign and Colonial Office dispatches in the seclusion of her rooms was a fiction, in his view. And how could she do the work of government properly at Balmoral in isolation from her ministers? Ever more entrenched in going nowhere and seeing only the few people she liked, Victoria did not even enjoy having her children around her. If there was a choice between staying at Balmoral for one of the riotous ghillies’ balls arranged by Brown or returning to London when the political situation demanded her presence, she always chose the former.1

  The subtle and self-effacing Ponsonby had arrived at a time when the Queen most needed him. Unlike his predecessor – his uncle-in-law General Grey – Ponsonby was able to temper his exasperation at Victoria’s most provocative bad qualities with a deeply felt affection and loyalty, where Grey had simply been worn down by them and, ultimately, alienated. Ponsonby demonstrated great skill in fielding Victoria’s often irrational outbursts about the pressures placed on her with a discreet irreverence behind the scenes for their unreasonableness. But while his sardonic wit was his great saving grace, it required all his considerable resources of patience, tact and tolerance to carry out his duties in the face of the Queen’s now-legendary intransigence. He was under no illusions as to the precariousness of the situation that year: ‘If…she is neither the head of the Executive nor the fountain of honour, nor the centre of display, the royal dignity will sink to nothing at all,’ he warned.2The Liberal minister Lord Halifax agreed: ‘the mass of the people expect a King or a Queen to look and play the part. They want to see a Crown and a Sceptre and all that sort of thing. They want the gilding for their money.’3

  Early in 1871, faced with the prospect of another daughter to marry – this time one of her least popular ones, Louise – Victoria for once showed no reluctance in doing her queenly duty by opening Parliament. It was a repetition of the situation she had faced in 1866 with Helena and Affie; she needed to secure a £30,000 dowry for Louise, followed shortly afterwards by an annuity of £15,000 for Prince Arthur when he came of age. But these further demands on the privy purse prompted renewed criticism of her failure visibly to earn her income, fuelled by publication of a pseudonymous pamphlet asking ‘What Does She Do With It?’, which accused her of secreting up to £200,000 a year of her Civil List monies, tax-free, for her own private purposes.4The immensely wealthy Argyll family into which Louise was marrying – and for once the groom was a British commoner rather than an impoverished foreign prince – hardly needed the money, and there was widespread public objection to the demand. Animosity was whipped up once more: it was time the Queen stepped down or the monarchy was done away with altogether. Charles Bradlaugh, President of the London Republican Club, argued that ‘the experience of the last nine years proves that the country can do quite well without a monarch’, urging not violent overthrow, but a peaceful transition. After so many years of only nominal monarchy, the Act of Settlement that had established the House of Hanover on the British throne in 1701 should be revoked on the Queen’s decease.5

  Gladstone loyally defended the Queen throughout the controversy and threw his full political weight behind her requests, but was not helped by gossip about Bertie’s huge gambling losses in the casinos of Homburg; the Prince’s popularity was plummeting in tandem with the Queen’s. Eventually Parliament agreed to both sums, though fifty-four members supported a call for Prince Arthur’s annuity to be reduced to £10,000. Continuing demands for the Queen’s greater visibility met with a tepid response from Victoria, who agreed to a couple of Drawing Rooms held consecutively at Buckingham Palace (so that she only had to tolerate one overnight stay there), a review of the troops in Bushey Park and a brief showing of herself in an open carriage on 21 March, when she drove with Princess Louise on her wedding day the short distance down the hill from the Upper Ward of Windsor Castle to St George’s Chapel. But the ceremony itself, at which the Queen played a more prominent role giving Louise away, was witnessed only by the select few and the date, during Lent, was chosen entirely to suit the Queen’s holiday schedule and not that of her churchgoing public, many of whom protested at its inappropriateness.

  Eight days later Victoria re-emerged for the official opening of Prince Albert’s brainchild, the Royal Albert Hall, which had been under construction for four years as a centre for the celebration of British culture. It was a key moment in the memorialisation of her dead husband, and the Queen faced this gathering of 8,000 – the biggest function she had attended since Albert was alive – with considerable trepidation. Her public were to be disappointed by her lack of visible engagement; durin
g the brief ceremony, despite looking well and smiling and impressing everyone with her compelling regal dignity, Victoria could barely muster more than a brief sentence, in which she expressed her ‘admiration of this beautiful hall’ and her good wishes for its success.6Was she playing to the gallery, one wonders? When it came to the moment of declaring the hall open, she appeared totally overwhelmed and Bertie was obliged to say the words for her. Beyond this, she remained obdurate in her resistance to any other demands on her for the performance of ceremony. Gladstone, for all his loyalty to the throne, privately found her waywardness increasingly difficult – if not repellent in its self-servitude. But try as he might, his inducements to the Queen to increase her official duties brought only peremptory, if not hysterical lists of objections.

  By the late summer of 1871, with the press warning that ‘England might virtually be left without a Sovereign for half a century’ if Victoria lived to a ripe old age, conspiracy was brewing even at Windsor.7The Queen’s children were seriously alarmed that their mother was prejudicing the future of the throne. Her conspicuous habit of grief had now become a habit of avoidance, made worse by Jenner’s constant pandering to Victoria’s neuroses, which they all felt had to be confronted once and for all. During a family gathering at Balmoral, and under the guidance of Vicky and a gloomily pessimistic Princess Alice, who were both visiting from Germany, they composed a letter to their mother in which they tried as respectfully and affectionately as they could to make her see the truth of her position. Signed by them all, the letter assured the Queen that they had ‘each of us individually wished to say this to you’, and that they had done so from the conviction that had come upon them all ‘that some danger is in the air, that something must be done…to avert a frightful calamity’:

  No one has prompted us to write…No one knows except we ourselves…It is we your children, whose position in the world had been made so good by the wisdom and forethought, and the untiring care of yourself and dear Papa, who now feel how utterly changed things are, and who would humbly entreat you to enquire into the state of public feeling, which appears to us so very alarming.8

  Just as the children were collectively gathering their resolve to hand the letter over to their mother, however, events overtook them. For Victoria fell ill – and seriously so – for once allaying any accusations of malingering. In early August what seemed like a bout of her usual insomnia and headaches was accompanied by a sore throat and complicated soon afterwards by the development of a painful swelling under her arm.9Her sufferings all the more justified Victoria’s professed intention to decamp as swiftly as possible to the sanctuary of Balmoral. Gladstone objected, asking her to postpone her departure until after the Privy Council meeting to be held when Parliament had been prorogued – thus sparing her ministers the arduous journey north. Victoria was incensed by his ‘interference with the Queen’s personal acts and movements’; it was ‘really abominable’.10She railed at the wicked persecution to which she was being subjected. Feeling ill as she now did, she had no intention of being further inconvenienced or made to stay in London to gratify what she saw as Gladstone’s political ends, and once again she resorted to the bottom line: ‘unless the Ministers support her…she cannot go on and must give her heavy burden up to younger hands’.11

  With the Queen having protested endlessly for the last ten years about the precarious state of her health, no one believed her at first; but on 14 August her sore throat rapidly got worse, affecting her ability to eat and speak. Unaware of the true extent of her illness, Gladstone found her continuing protests ‘sickening’, confiding in Henry Ponsonby (who also felt she should stay until the prorogation) that ‘Smaller and meaner cause for the decay of thrones cannot be conceived…it is like the worm which bores the bark of a noble oak tree and so breaks the channel of its life.’12Victoria was by now too ill to care; on 17 August she summoned all her strength to undertake the long train ride to Balmoral. Once there, she was soon bedridden. Although the agonising pain in her throat finally gave way on the 20th, she was in increasing discomfort from the swelling under her arm, which had developed into a large abscess; her appetite vanished and she rapidly lost weight.

  With no sign of the abscess breaking, Dr Jenner was worried that it might lead to septicaemia. Although the public had had no inkling of it, nor too Victoria’s ministers, Jenner even feared for her life. He dared not summon her children, knowing that their presence would only alarm Victoria and make matters worse; in any event, at such times she preferred the solicitous presence of Brown and her close personal servants Löhlein, Annie Macdonald and her dresser Emilie Dittweiler.13Unwilling to explain the true nature of her illness and uncertain as to what had provoked it, Jenner nevertheless felt compelled to defend the Queen against criticism from her ministers that she was once again crying wolf. From such a distance they could hardly be blamed, for they did not know the true facts. In an anonymous piece in The Lancet on 19 August he therefore catalogued her precarious physical state, her inability to tolerate crowded and overheated rooms and the continuing severe headaches, insomnia and loss of appetite that she was suffering. He also argued long and forcefully with Ponsonby about the necessity for her to spend any time in London. Ponsonby was dismayed by Jenner’s action – he felt it played straight into the hands of those claiming the Queen was no longer fit to rule and should abdicate: ‘Why should we wait any longer,’ they would say, ‘she promises not to do more, but positively to do less.’14

  With complaints gathering in the English press, the Scottish papers loyally rebutted criticism of the Queen, praising her for not kowtowing to the trifling gestures of London life or suggestions that she allow Bertie to take over Buckingham Palace. Jenner weighed into the political arguments too: it wasn’t the Queen’s fault; all this criticism directed at her was symptomatic of the ‘advancing democracy of the age’. ‘It is absurd to think that it will be checked by her driving about London and giving balls for the frivolous classes of Society,’ he told Ponsonby. Jenner felt beleaguered; in the end he could only warn, as he had done since the death of Albert, of the dark prospect of the Queen suffering a breakdown if pushed too hard: ‘these nerves are a form of madness, and against them it is hopeless to contend’.15

  Queen Victoria was little better by early September; she had not felt this ill, she said, since her bout of typhoid fever in 1835. It was therefore decided to call in a surgeon, Dr Joseph Lister, from Edinburgh. On the 4th he lanced the abscess, which had now reached six inches in diameter and was very deep-seated, first freezing it with ether. Lister was a pioneer of antisepsis and, in order to minimise the risk of infection, used his own carbolic-acid spraying machine – the ‘donkey engine’ as he called it – during the procedure. Jenner was enlisted to work the bellows of the spray, inadvertently choking the Queen in a cloud of pungent phenol.16When the wound still did not drain properly, Lister applied a rubber drainage tube, the first time this procedure had been used. It was, Victoria declared, ‘a most disagreeable duty most pleasantly performed’.17Within a week she was showing clear signs of recovery. Thin and pale, she was wheeled around in a bath chair for days – everyone who saw her was shocked at her frailty. It was only now that news of the Queen’s serious illness was released to the nation, prompting a mass stirring of public sympathy and anxiety, if not expressions of guilt for having accused her of malingering. The royal children, agreeing that any shock tactics with their mother might now backfire, quietly put their letter away, agreeing not to present it to her till early the following year – ‘if at all’.18The illness had now played into Victoria’s hands, and Princess Alice thought that nothing could be done to remedy her mother’s infuriating complacency: ‘She thinks the Monarchy will last her time and that it is no use thinking of what will come after…so she lets the torrent come on.’19Victoria was satisfyingly vindicated by the remorse of newspapers such as the Daily News, which on 15 September published a toadying apology. The people ‘may have caught from a discontented Court
a complaining spirit’, it observed ingenuously:

  They may have been induced to feel that the Queen was hardly giving proper splendour to her Queenly position and was showing some slackness in her Queenly duties; but today all such complaints are hushed, the nation is ashamed of them and rebukes itself for uttering them, and feels nothing but an affectionate solicitude for her speedy recovery.

  Three months on from the onset of her illness Victoria was still weak and in a lot of pain. Despite recovering from the abscess, she had been further disabled by a severe attack of rheumatic gout in many of her joints, and her hands and feet were badly swollen and bandaged; her nights were restless and she was dosing heavily on chloral. She felt utterly helpless, unable to feed herself or write her journal, which for weeks now she had been dictating to fourteen-year-old Beatrice. John Brown was constantly in attendance, carrying her to and from her bed, and her couch and up and down stairs. It was November before she could manage the stairs again. To be so incapacitated had been ‘a bitter trial’, and just as she was finally recovering her strength, a renewed attack on her was launched by the rising young Liberal MP for Chelsea, Sir Charles Dilke.20In a speech at Newcastle on 6 November 1871 he criticised the cost to the nation of the Civil List, particularly when the Queen rarely held court in London. He accused her of hoarding a private, untaxed fortune, as well as draining the royal coffers through the maintenance of an excessive number of obsolete sinecures – did Her Majesty really need a Hereditary Grand Falconer or a Master of the Buckhounds? Or, for that matter, did she require a collection of twenty-one assorted physicians, dentists, oculists and apothecaries to safeguard the health of the royal family? ‘If you can show me a fair chance that a republic here will be free from the political corruption that hangs about the monarch, I say, for my part – and I believe the middle classes in general will say – let it come.’21