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VICTORIAN WOMEN WERE expected to mourn their husbands publicly, wearing widow’s weeds of deepest black for one year and half mourning for at least six months after that. Remarriage was frowned upon in certain quarters, not least by the Queen, who believed that she would be reunited with her beloved Albert in the afterlife. As a woman, it was considered only right and proper that Victoria should grieve and be incapacitated following her husband’s death. As sovereign, however, she was expected to resume her political and ceremonial duties after a decent interval. Always torn between her private and public lives, prostrate with grief, Victoria resented and resisted pressure to perform. The chivalry of her ministers did much to protect her from the inevitable backlash.
At first Victoria thought she was ‘going mad’ with grief. She kept tapping her forehead and repeating, ‘My reason! My reason!’ She had always feared and dreaded madness. It was hardly surprising, then, that some believed that hereditary eccentricities, perhaps even George III’s madness, were reasserting themselves, although there is no evidence that she had inherited the porphyria gene from her grandfather. For a time she refused to meet her ministers face to face, using Princess Alice or her equerry, General Charles Grey, as go-betweens. When the Privy Council met, the Queen sat in one room, the counsellors in another, with the door open but Victoria hidden from view, as the secretary to the Council, Arthur Helps, communicated her wishes.
Sir James Clark denied Victoria was ‘mad’, but acknowledged her to be highly strung and conceded her duty to pay attention to her ‘nerves’. Sir William Jenner, who succeeded Clark as physician-in-ordinary, inclined more to Stockmar’s belief in Victoria’s mental instability. Victoria was not mad, but she positively wallowed in her grief and, with Albert gone, there was no one to gainsay her. She shamelessly used her doctors to keep her ministers at bay. Jenner would write snippets in the Lancet emphasizing the Queen’s imperative need for ‘repose and rest’, but many of his communications were composed and dictated by Victoria herself.
‘I will do all I can to follow out all his wishes – to live for you all and for my duties,’ she promised her eldest daughter in the immediate aftermath of Albert’s death.
But how I, who leant on him for all and everything – without whom I did nothing, moved not a finger, arranged not a print or photograph, didn’t put on a gown or bonnet if he didn’t approve it shall be able to go on, to live, to move, to help myself in difficult moments? How I shall long to ask his advice!… The day – the night (above all the night) is too sad and weary … I try to feel and think I am living on with him, and that his pure and perfect spirit is guiding and leading me and inspiring me!
To Uncle Leopold she wrote:
The poor fatherless baby of eight months is now the utterly brokenhearted and crushed widow of forty-two! My life as a happy one is ended! The world is gone for me! If I must live on … it is henceforth for our poor fatherless children – for my unhappy country, which has lost all in losing him – and in only doing what I know and feel he would wish … But oh! To be cut off in the prime of life – to see our pure, happy, quiet domestic life, which alone enabled me to bear my much disliked position, cut off at forty-two – is too awful, too cruel!
A few days later she assured him that Albert’s ‘views about everything are to be my law! And no human power will make me swerve from what he decided and wished.’
As someone who had hitherto formed a habit of dependence on men, she would now have to find within herself qualities of independence and self-reliance previously unknown to her. She was determined, she told Leopold, ‘that no one person, may he be ever so good, ever so devoted among my servants – is to lead or guide or dictate to me … And I live on with him, for him; in fact I am only outwardly separated from him, and only for a time.’
More than a year after Albert’s death, Lord Clarendon had a meeting with the Queen in which she constantly referred to the Prince Consort ‘as if he was in the next room, indeed it was difficult not to think that he was so for everything was set out on his table, the blotting book open with a pen upon it, his watch going, fresh flowers in the glass’. ‘She believes that his eye is now constantly upon her,’ Clarendon continued, ‘that he watches every action of hers and that in fact she never ceases to be in communion with his spirit.’ There were rumours that she took part in séances to summon up his spirit, but they seem to be unfounded. After the deaths of her mother and husband, ceremonies for the dead – above and beyond even the elaborate mourning customs of the age – became part of a way of life for Victoria. Her only happiness was in dwelling on her departed loved ones.
At Windsor she dedicated the Blue Room as a shrine to Albert. Rather than following the German custom of the Sterbezimmer, where time stands still and the only change is measured in the accumulation of dust, Victoria had the room redecorated, laid wreaths on both beds, and ordered new china. The sculptor William Theed fashioned a marble bust of the Prince, to be placed between the two beds. Albert’s dressing case stood open and ready, fresh towels and hot water were replenished daily and his clothes laid out ready to wear. Every day Victoria would place fresh flowers on the bed. She slept clutching his nightshirt. A marble model of his dead hand stood on the table beside her bed for her to clutch, while a photograph of Albert taken after his death lay on his pillow in every bed she slept in.
Whatever Albert had liked, touched or designed became preserved as sacred relics. Accordingly, Victoria spent much of her time at Osborne and Balmoral. When the upholstery at either home wore out, it had to be removed silently, reproduced exactly and the furniture replaced precisely where it had always stood. At Windsor, of course, she could visit Albert’s resting place in the mausoleum she had built for them both at Frogmore; she went every day. She brought the family there to visit him, feel his presence, even to receive his judgements.
Victoria, who believed so strongly in mourning that she insisted that even babies and nurseries should be swathed in it, had decided to wear full mourning for the rest of her life. The undemanding simplicity of a widow’s black dresses and caps suited her admirably; it was one less worry, as she grappled with the work of government and the affairs of her large fatherless family. All correspondence was conducted on paper with one-inch black borders, so that her large loopy handwriting had to be squeezed into the remaining space. Eventually she abandoned the heavy black crape of first mourning for lighter silks and plain black cloth, adorned with lace or jet, silver, gold and ermine, and copious quantities of jewellery. It was Victoria’s adherence to strict mourning that made her so reluctant to don her red Parliament robes, which lay draped over the throne during the State Opening of Parliament, whether the Queen was present or not. The widow’s white cap with the long streamers was worn more frequently than the crown.
It was not until 1864 that she decreed that although her ladies-in-waiting must continue to wear black when in attendance on her at court, the other ladies of her household might wear lilac, grey or white, the colours of half mourning. There was always the chance, however, that one of the Queen’s numerous royal relations would die, plunging them all back into full mourning. A young maid of honour who despaired of ever getting out of black was once tempted to ask, ‘Ma’am, how many more relations do you have?’
Victoria’s acute loneliness was exacerbated by the isolation of her unique position as queen. She had friends among her ladies, notably the Duchesses of Sutherland and Atholl, Lady Ely and Lady Augusta Bruce, but she had never been able to forget she was Queen and confide in them, woman to woman. Albert had been best friend as well as lover. She missed him physically. ‘What a dreadful going to bed! What a contrast to that tender lover’s love! All alone!’ she confided in her journal. ‘I am alas! not old – my feelings are strong and warm; my love is ardent,’ she confessed to Vicky. Only the baby of the family, four-year-old Princess Beatrice, could offer some solace. ‘Sweet little Beatrice comes to lie in my bed every morning which is a comfort,’ she told Vicky. ‘I long so to cling to and clasp a loving being.’
It was unfortunate for Victoria that, coinciding with her double bereavement, she was approaching the change of life – a partial death in itself. The Victorians believed that forty-two was a dangerous age for a woman. In an intermittent fertile state, the ‘dodging time’, women in their forties were entering the phase the Victorian medical profession called ‘the climacteric’. The label denotes danger, a crisis when virtually anything in a woman’s physical or mental constitution could go awry. She was likely to be peevish, irritable, morose and passionate on the slightest provocation; she found it difficult to concentrate and could not tolerate noise. Much of Victoria’s behaviour during her early widowhood fits this description. As she wrote to her eldest daughter in February 1863, prior to her visit: ‘I wish you would say in your affectionate letters that you will do all to help me in checking noise, and joyousness in my presence for I fear you always think that I am not ill, that I can bear it, and I cannot and it makes me wretched and miserable beforehand if I think I shall be excited. I cannot join you at dinner; I must keep very, very quiet.’
Not only was Victoria going through the peri-menopause, but the doctors believed that the melancholia at the loss of the person she most depended on, coming only a few months after the death of her mother, could intensify the malady. In June 1863 she told Leopold:
I have been so unwell, the result of over-exertion this last week, that I can hardly hold my pen for shaking, and hardly know what I am about. I was so unwell on Sunday, from violent nervous headache and complete prostration, that I nearly fainted, and Clark and Jenner both say that, with the extreme state of weakness which I am in, if I did faint I might not come back to life. My weakness has increased to that extent within the last two months, as to make all my good doctors anxious. It is all the result of overwork, over-anxiety, and the weight of responsibility and constant sorrow and craving and yearning for the one absorbing object of my love, and the one only Being who could quiet and calm me; I feel like a poor hunted hare, like a child that has lost its mother, and so lost, so frightened and helpless.
According to Victorian doctors, the climacteric could be brought on by emotional shock. ‘Wherever widowhood or separation takes place at the change of life, all the distressing symptoms and the ovario-uterine excitement, are considerably aggravated,’ one of them wrote. Without the regular monthly bleed, it was believed that the menopausal female body was left victim of its own undisciplined devices. There was a curious notion that blood not expelled during menstruation turned to fat in the menopausal woman. Within a decade of Albert’s death, Victoria’s waist was forty-eight inches, making her only ten inches less wide in the middle than she was tall.
In spite of the sympathy she deserves going through the menopause at a time of immense sorrow and upheaval, it cannot be denied that Victoria was indulging in a selfish and self-centred grief of which Albert would not have approved. Blaming Bertie, unfairly, for his father’s death, Victoria confessed that she could not look at her eldest son ‘without a shudder’. When Princess Alice, who had been her constant companion since Albert’s death, married in the summer of 1862, Victoria had to admit that it was ‘more like a funeral than a wedding’. There was to be no relaxation in mourning and the wedding was a subdued affair. Victoria could think only of herself and her own loss; she envied her children their prospects of happy married life.
When the Prince of Wales married the beautiful and gentle Princess Alexandra of Denmark in March 1863, Victoria behaved like the spectre at the feast. When they arrived at Windsor, the Queen took her new daughter-in-law and Bertie straight to Albert’s tomb at Frogmore. ‘He gives you his blessing,’ she assured them after this morbid greeting, joining their hands together and kissing them. Just as she had with Princess Alice, she had her photograph taken with Bertie and his bride, with Theed’s bust of Albert in the middle. Victoria gazes up at her dead spouse, making it clear that she was pledged to the past and death, rather than to the future through the young couple. Similarly, photographs of Victoria the widow looking sadly at a bust of Albert, distributed in the form of cartes de visite, were public demonstrations of the depths of her grief; the viewer became a voyeur of the Queen’s suffering.
At the wedding in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, her black-clad figure watched the proceedings taking place below from the obscurity of Katherine of Aragon’s closet, exciting the curiosity of Disraeli who was caught raising his monocle to get a better look at her, so long had it been since she had been seen in public. She refused to join the rest of the family at the luncheon that followed, dining alone with ‘Baby’. As soon as Bertie and his bride left on their honeymoon Victoria returned to the mausoleum with her daughter Lenchen and ‘prayed by that beloved resting-place, feeling soothed and calmed’.
Leopold advised her that she would find consolation in work. Sitting very straight to ease the pressure on the back, Victoria had always been a dutiful desk worker, preferring it to her ceremonial role, but she was simply unused to the sheer volume and complexity of the paperwork, a burden that Albert had carried for her for so long. ‘I must work and work, and can’t rest and the amount of work which comes upon me is more than I can bear!’ she complained to Vicky. ‘I who always hated business, have now nothing but that! Public and private, it falls upon me! He, my own darling, lightened all and every thing, spared every trouble and anxiety and now I must labour alone!’
In spite of a formidable memory and grasp of detail, Victoria was never to exhibit Albert’s capacity for work. Whether she liked it or not, she would inevitably be less of a hands-on monarch than Albert had intended. Domestic policy, including social reform, did not much interest her, although when she embraced a cause – such as opposition to vivisection or cruelty to animals – she did so wholeheartedly. She remained as opposed as ever to women’s rights, denouncing the agitation for their advancement as ‘dangerous, unchristian and unnatural’.
‘The Queen is a woman herself – and knows what an anomaly her own position is … But to tear away all the barriers which surround a woman, and to propose that they should study with men – things which could not be named before them – certainly not in a mixed audience – would be to introduce a total disregard of what must be considered as belonging to the rules and principles of morality,’ she commented on the proposal to admit women to the study of medicine. ‘Let woman be what God intended; a helpmate for a man – but with totally different duties and vocations,’ she wrote to Gladstone in 1870.
On no account were women to be given any political recognition. ‘The Queen is most anxious to enlist every one who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of “Women’s Rights”, with all its attendant horrors, on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feeling and propriety. Lady —— ought to get a good whipping.’
‘It is a subject which makes the Queen so furious that she cannot contain herself,’ she continued. ‘God created men and women different – then let them remain each in their own position … Woman would become the most hateful, heathen, and disgusting of human beings were she allowed to unsex herself; and where would be the protection which man was intended to give the weaker sex?’
Even in mourning, Victoria could still summon the will to oppose and obstruct her ministers and did not hesitate to do so; she was a shrewd, persistent and opinionated adviser of her governments. Given her tendency to see politics in personal terms, she was only really roused by foreign affairs, in which many of her own relatives were the key players. Here she insisted that no step was to be taken without her previous sanction and she exercised close control over the content of despatches. Ideally, she would have liked the Foreign Secretary to report directly to her without reference to the Cabinet. Bagehot was to dismiss the Queen as ‘a retired widow’; not having read her letters, published after her death, he could not know the extent of her interference.
In the Schleswig-Holstein dispute, which blew up in 1864, her views were directly opposed to those of her chief ministers, Lords Palmerston and Russell. Should the duchies belong to Denmark or be part of the German confederacy? The question was complicated and was said to be understood by only three people: a German professor who had gone mad, the Prince Consort who was dead, and Lord Palmerston, who had long since forgotten what it was all about. Following Albert’s known wish to see a united Germany under a strong, liberal Prussia and her own German bias, Victoria was considered a partisan. It is difficult to determine how far she really was responsible for British neutrality and the abandonment of Denmark to its fate. She expressed her wishes, which ran contrary to those of the Prince and Princess of Wales, of course, and a large section of public opinion, most vociferously to Palmerston:
The Queen has read with the greatest alarm and astonishment the draft of a despatch … in which Lord Russell … stated that, in the event of the occupation of Schleswig by Prussia … Denmark would resist such an occupation and that Great Britain would aid her in that resistance. The Queen has never given her sanction to any such threat, nor does it appear to agree with the decision arrived at by the Cabinet upon this question … England cannot be committed to assist Denmark in such a collision. The Queen has declared that she will not sanction the infliction upon her subjects of all the horrors of war, for the purpose of becoming a partisan in a quarrel in which both parties are much in the wrong.
Not only did she express her wishes, she insisted on them prevailing.
On numerous occasions Victoria’s knowledge of and contacts with foreign rulers proved to be of immense value. Although she was pro-German, she was not necessarily pro-Prussian and was often at pains to curb Prussian arrogance. In 1864 she offered to intervene to smooth the peace process, writing to Vicky’s father-in-law, the King of Prussia: ‘I should deeply regret if the prospect of Peace were to be marred by too great demands of Prussia. Your arms have been victorious, and it now depends on the use you make of your victory, whether the public opinion which now inclines to the weaker side be rallied on your side or not.’ And in 1870, at the end of the Franco-Prussian War, she wrote to him again: ‘The Queen asks the King of Prussia as a friend whether, in the interests of suffering humanity, he could so shape his demands as to enable the French to accept them.’
She could expect to make less headway with Bismarck, although he considered her a worthy and formidable adversary. When she had a meeting with the Iron Chancellor in Berlin in 1888, after the accession of her grandson, Kaiser Wilhelm II, her private secretary Arthur Bigge noted that Bismarck emerged mopping his brow. ‘That was a woman,’ he said. ‘One could do business with her.’
In spite of all this activity in international relations, at home ministers were frustrated by the Queen’s lack of visibility. In 1864 a notice was pinned to the railings of Buckingham Palace in the manner of an advertisement: ‘These commanding premises to be let or sold, in consequence of the late occupant’s declining business.’ ‘To be invisible is to be forgotten … To be a symbol, and an effective symbol, you must be visibly and often seen,’ Bagehot admonished three years later. Victoria was adamant that she would remain in seclusion. By 1863 a decent period of mourning had elapsed, but she refused to perform one of her foremost ceremonial duties: the State Opening of Parliament, where her presence symbolized her wholehearted confidence in the government of the day. At the end of the following year, she excused herself again, writing a memorandum to Lord Russell:
The Queen would wish to say with reference to what Lord Russell said to her this morning about the opening of Parliament, that she would be thankful if he would take any opportunity that might offer to undeceive people upon that head. The Queen was always terribly nervous on all public occasions, but especially at the opening of Parliament, which was what she dreaded for days before, and hardly ever went through without suffering from headache before or after the ceremony; but then she had the support of her dear husband, whose presence alone seemed a tower of strength … Now this is gone, and no child can feel more shrinking and nervous than the poor Queen does, when she has to do anything, which approaches to representation; she dreads a Council even.
Her nerves are so shattered that any emotion, any discussion, any exertion causes much disturbance and suffering to her whole frame. The constant anxieties inseparable from her difficult and unenviable position as Queen, and as mother of a large family (and that, a Royal family), without a husband to guide, assist, soothe, comfort, and cheer her, are so great that her nervous system has no power of recovery, but on the contrary becomes weaker and weaker. This being the case, Lord Russell … will at once see that any great exertion which would entail a succession of moral shocks as well as very great fatigue, which the Queen must avoid as much as possible, would be totally out of the question.
She has no wish to shut herself up from her loyal people, and has and will at any time seize any occasion which might offer to appear amongst them (painful as it ever is now), provided she could do so without the fatigue and exertion of any State ceremony entailing full dress, etc.
The situation had scarcely altered two years later, when she wrote to Russell comparing the opening of Parliament to an execution, so great an ordeal was it for her:
The Queen must say that she does feel very bitterly the want of feeling of those who ask the Queen to go to open Parliament. That the public should wish to see her she fully understands, and has no wish to prevent – quite the contrary; but why this wish should be of so unreasonable and unfeeling a nature, as to long to witness the spectacle of a poor, broken-hearted widow, nervous and shrinking, dragged in deep mourning, alone in State as a Show, where she used to go supported by her husband, to be gazed at, without delicacy of feeling, is a thing she cannot understand, and she never could wish her bitterest foe to be exposed to!
A king would not have got away with it or expected to, but allowances had to be made for a female ruler – a unique and unfathomable element in public life. To be fair, since her widowhood Victoria had developed trouble with her legs, so that at times she could not actually walk. The doctors associated this incapacity with hysteria. It might be assumed that she had now passed from the peri-menopause to the menopause proper. Seven years after Albert’s death, Vicky was to write to her mother: ‘I fear you are already approaching a stage in your health, which is said to be the most trying and unpleasant in a woman’s life, and at which the strongest constitutions suffer as well as the most delicate.’
When it suited her, Victoria was an astute manipulator of the perceived weakness of her sex. She knew that she could rely on the chivalry of her ministers and, of course, they were far too reticent or embarrassed to recognize the real cause of the Queen’s contradictory behaviour. As one of Gladstone’s private secretaries wrote: ‘Many were the times when, if Mr G. had chosen to cross her and take his own line on the threat of resigning, she would have had to give way to him or have run the risk of bringing the crown into odium. But sooner than this, he would give way – he attached such great importance to the maintenance of the monarchy as a popular institution, and he felt that much was due to [the throne’s being occupied by] a woman.’
What baffled and infuriated the ministers was the fact that Victoria seemed perfectly capable of attending any number of opening ceremonies for Albert memorials; she could dance with abandon at the gillies’ ball at Balmoral, ride up in the hills all day long whatever the weather, or ‘nip’ over to Germany; but she refused point blank to open Parliament or defer her departure for Balmoral or Osborne on occasions when it would have helped the government. In June 1867, for instance, she was asked to delay her journey to Osborne for three or four days in order to greet the Sultan of Turkey. It turned into the usual tussle with Victoria writing to Lord Derby: ‘The word distasteful is hardly applicable to the subject; it would be rather nearer the mark to say extremely inconvenient and disadvantageous for the Queen’s health.’ While conceding grudgingly that she would change her schedule to meet the Sultan, she suggested that he change his own plans and arrive a day earlier. ‘Still, whatever the poor Queen can do she will; but she will not be dictated to, or teased by public clamour into doing what she physically cannot, and she expects her Ministers to protect her from such attempt.’
‘Eliza is roaring well and can do everything she likes and nothing she doesn’t,’ Clarendon remarked. Her wilfulness impaired the monarchy’s credibility, to the despair of its supporters, and gave rise to fears that it might have outlived its usefulness.
She did open Parliament in 1866 and afterwards told Russell that she hoped that he would ‘in future trust to her doing what she believes to be necessary for the good of the country, without her movements being dictated to her.’ Only by preserving her health, she argued, could she continue to serve. The following year brought in the Second Reform Bill, adding nearly 1 million more voters to the electorate, and the Tory Lord Derby persuaded the Queen that she should show her support for the proposed legislation by opening Parliament in person. The Reform Bill was very much the work of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Benjamin Disraeli, who had taken the trouble to ingratiate himself with her, and so she agreed, but with the proviso that ‘the Queen must have it clearly understood that she is not to be expected to do it as a matter of course, year after year.’
‘Yesterday was a wretched day,’ she complained to Vicky after the opening, ‘and altogether I regret I went – for that stupid Reform agitation has excited and irritated people, and there was a good deal of hissing, some groans and calls for Reform, which I – in my present forlorn position – ought not to be exposed to. There were many, nasty faces – and I felt it painfully. At such times the Sovereign should not be there.’
Victoria was largely sympathetic to electoral reform, although not universal suffrage. ‘The higher classes – especially the aristocracy … are so frivolous, pleasure-seeking, heartless, selfish, immoral and gambling that it makes one think … of the days before the French Revolution. The young men are so ignorant, luxurious and self-indulgent – and the young women so fast, frivolous and imprudent that the danger really is very great, and they ought to be warned,’ she wrote to Vicky, no doubt recalling that the Prince of Wales was very much part of the ‘fast set’ she so deplored. ‘The lower classes are becoming so well-informed, are so intelligent and earn their bread and riches so deservedly – that they cannot and ought not to be kept back – to be abused by the wretched, ignorant, high-born beings who live only to kill time.’
William Gladstone, the Liberal who became Prime Minister in November 1868, was highly critical of Victoria’s reluctance to perform her ceremonial duties and of her long absences from the capital. ‘To speak in rude and general terms, the Queen is invisible and the Prince of Wales is not respected,’ he complained. Others joined the chorus of disapproval.
The mid 1860s were a time of acute political tension, economic difficulties and social dislocation; pauperism and unemployment reached levels unknown since 1848. If the monarchy at the apex of society were allowed to decay through inanition, surely the whole social fabric would collapse? The exacting standards set by Albert were those the public had now come to expect of the monarchy, and it seemed that Victoria was no longer meeting them. It was asserted that the middle classes were disaffected because their feelings of loyalty were not constantly ‘nourished by fantastic ceremonies and spectacles’ and the ‘outward signs and symbols’ by which they were ‘unconsciously swayed’. Walter Bagehot argued that by her prolonged absence from public life, ‘the Queen has done almost as much to injure the popularity of the monarchy … as the most unworthy of her predecessors did by his profligacy and frivolity.’
But Bagehot was a political journalist writing in The Economist and tended to view the monarchy in narrow political terms. This was to ignore the whole gamut of philanthropic and civic activities that Albert had initiated and encouraged in the 1840s and 1850s and which Victoria quietly continued after his death. As queen and head of a hierarchical society in which it was the Christian duty of the better off to help those beneath them, Victoria had always taken her charitable duties seriously and set a good example to others. Attention to benevolent causes and the encouragement of public-spirited endeavour reflected well on the monarchy, as well as the civic institutions and individuals who participated.
Victoria contributed to hundreds of charities, including schools, hospitals, churches and asylums; she would far rather open a hospital – she laid the foundation stone of the new St Thomas’s Hospital in May 1868, for instance – than Parliament and, while ‘politically invisible’, was busy enough visiting hospitals, prisons and workhouses and doing what she could to ameliorate the conditions of the poor. She gave donations to the relief of victims of earthquakes and storms, fires and shipwrecks, famines and colliery disasters. About 15 per cent of her Privy Purse income, or 10 per cent of her personal wealth, was donated to good causes, while the value of royal patronage was incalculable.
Gladstone had his own agenda in urging the Queen to be more visible. By being seen to associate with royalty in public, politicians hope a little of the magic will rub off on them. It was important to be seen to have royal endorsement for their policies. Victoria, who had begun life as a Whig, had become a Conservative. She distrusted the Liberals and her dislike of Gladstone – ‘I cannot find him very agreeable, and he talks very much,’ she told Vicky – would soon turn to loathing. Treat the Queen as a woman, his wife urged, to no avail. Gladstone addressed the Queen like a public meeting, writing long, tedious, indigestible memos she could not understand.
Reform had been the work of the Conservatives, but no one knew how reliable the new electorate would be. While it alarmed the upper classes, there was disillusionment at the limited scope of the Second Reform Act. Gladstone wanted the Queen to open Parliament in February 1869 to give the new legislation her seal of approval. Her refusal to do so was a political act, as she was vigorously opposed to Gladstone’s Irish policy. Ironically, her reversion to her old tactic of publicly withholding royal endorsement for a political agenda mattered less as the electorate became broader-based. Increasingly, politicians drew their authority from the people, not the crown.
The first real break in Victoria’s seclusion came in November 1869, when Gladstone persuaded her to go in public procession in an open carriage for the opening ceremony of Blackfriars Bridge and Holborn Viaduct. One million people waited in the cold to see her pass. ‘Nothing could have been more gratifying,’ she wrote in her journal that evening. Through the long years of seclusion, Victoria had never doubted her popularity or the loyalty of the people. Ministers despaired at the amount of time she spent in the Highlands – it was hardly conducive to the work of government for the monarch to be 600 miles away from Westminster, Disraeli had commented – but Victoria had deftly turned this to advantage with the publication early in 1868 of her Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands, which was a runaway success.
‘From all and every side, high and low, the feeling is the same, the letters flow in, saying how much more than ever I shall be loved, now that I am known and understood, and clamouring for the cheap edition for the poor – which will be ordered at once. 18,000 copies were sold in a week,’ Victoria gushed in a letter to Vicky, who like her siblings was embarrassed by her mother’s public revelations about the family’s private life. ‘It is very gratifying to see how people appreciate what is simple and right and how especially my truest friends – the people – feel it.’
Leaves from the Journal is an idealized portrait of Victoria’s life in the Highlands while Albert was still alive. She offers selected glimpses of family activities among close family retainers – one of them being the gillie, John Brown. It was a happy coincidence that the book presents the late lamented Albert as the paterfamilias, the central figure, at a time of growing rumours of an illicit connection between the Queen and Brown, whose rugged handsomeness, aggressive masculinity and familiar manner towards the Queen had fed the scandal. Albert had warmly approved of Brown, which was enough to recommend him to Victoria, and early in 1865 he was brought south as her outdoor servant, leading her out on her pony or in her carriage, where his sharp observation and quick response foiled more than one assassination attempt. He was quickly promoted to ‘an upper servant, and my permanent personal attendant’ – the Queen’s Highland servant. ‘It is a real comfort, for he is so devoted to me – so simple, so intelligent, so unlike an ordinary servant, and so cheerful and attentive,’ she had enthused to Leopold. To Vicky she wrote: ‘He comes to my room after breakfast and luncheon to get his orders – and everything is always right; he is so quiet, has such an excellent head and memory, and is besides so devoted, and attached and clever and so wonderfully able to interpret one’s wishes. He is a real treasure to me now, and I only wish higher people had his sense and discretion, and that I had as good a maid.’
She is describing a servant, not a lover, but ugly rumours persisted. Some maintained that the Queen had gone mad and Brown was her keeper, others that he was the Queen’s stallion. It is an illustration of the double standard that a man could take a mistress, but for a woman, even if unencumbered with a husband, to engage in an irregular sexual relationship was considered so outrageous as to be unthinkable. Respectable women, never mind queens, were not supposed to have sexual impulses. Doubts were reawakened about the efficacy of female rule. A pamphlet entitled Brown on the Throne compared the monarchy to a greengrocer’s shop; it suggested that others could run the business better than the ‘widow woman’ in nominal charge: ‘A woman can’t attend to it like a man.’ Victoria had fulfilled her role as wife and mother; perhaps now she should step aside and let her son take over.
The best that can be said of Brown is that, unlike numerous royal mistresses and favourites in the past, he was not personally ambitious or greedy and did not meddle in politics. Disraeli, who treated him with kid gloves nevertheless, had quite a lot of respect for him. But Brown, with his brusque manner, offended many. The Queen’s children were affronted by the familiarity with which he treated their mother – ‘Can yer no’ hold yer head up, wumman?’ was his typical manner of speaking to her – when everyone else including themselves approached her with awe. The Prince of Wales, who was already humiliated by his mother’s reluctance to give him any responsibility, bitterly resented Brown’s closeness to her. Soon, Brown’s wishes were given priority over theirs. The men of the royal family, all of whom smoked like chimneys, were informed that the smoking room would be closed at midnight, as it was inconvenient for Brown. Brown was allotted the best shooting and fishing. Brown had the ear of the Queen. They did not.
No one could deny that the relationship between Victoria and Brown was intense. It grew into one of mutual devotion. She described them as being best friends and she addressed him in a letter as ‘Darling One’. They liked a nip of whisky together. They were intimate, but it is unlikely that they were sexually intimate. Victoria believed in the class structure, but she was no snob; she was willing to flout the conventions to enjoy a close friendship with Brown. But how could Victoria, who believed she would be reunited with Albert in the afterlife, give herself to another man? Three hundred letters, many of them supposedly ‘most compromising’, written by the Queen to Brown were bought by Bertie after his mother’s death and destroyed. Perhaps a clue is to be found in her reaction to Brown’s death eighteen years after he had come to England to serve her.
The entry in her journal invites no suspicion of a relationship beyond that of employer and servant: ‘Leopold came to my dressing-room, and broke the dreadful news to me that my good, faithful Brown had passed away early this morning. Am terribly upset by the loss, which removes one who was so devoted and attached to my service and who did so much for my personal comfort. It is the loss not only of a servant, but of a real friend.’
The language lacks the usual drama and, indeed, the journal was doctored by Princess Beatrice after her mother’s death and some of it burned. However, the Queen’s letter to her daughter Vicky also refers to Brown in the same vein:
The terrible blow which has fallen so unexpectedly on me – and has crushed me – by tearing away from me not only the most devoted, faithful, intelligent and confidential servant who lived and, I may say (as he overworked himself) died for me – but my dearest best friend has so shaken me … The shock – the blow, the blank, the constant missing at every turn of the one strong, powerful reliable arm and head almost stunned me and I am truly overwhelmed.
She confided to Sir Henry Ponsonby, who had been equerry to the Prince Consort and was to serve her devotedly as private secretary and Keeper of the Privy Purse for twenty-five years: ‘The Queen is trying hard to occupy herself but she is utterly crushed and her life has again sustained one of those shocks like in 1861 when every link has been shaken and torn … the loss of the strong arm and the wise advice, warm heart and cheery original way of saying things and the sympathy … is most cruelly missed.’
Significantly, with the ‘loss of the strong arm’, the man she had depended on for nearly twenty years, she temporarily lost the use of her legs, just as she had when Albert died. ‘The Queen can’t walk the least and the shock she has sustained has made her very weak – so that she can’t stand,’ she told Ponsonby. Certainly, her private secretary did not believe that the Queen and Brown were lovers, or so his son Frederick believed.
After Brown’s death, she published a second volume of her Highland journal, More Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands, dedicated to her ‘devoted personal attendant and faithful friend John Brown’; later she decided to compose a memoir of the former gillie for publication. Her friend, Randall Davidson, Dean of Windsor, advised her to desist from this folly. Surely Victoria’s very artlessness in being so open and sincere about her affection for Brown shows that there was nothing ‘shameful’ to hide. She was transparently honest, without guile; deceit was not in her nature.
Meanwhile, in July 1866 Punch published a spoof of the Court Circular:
Balmoral, Tuesday
Mr John Brown walked on the slopes. He subsequently partook of a haggis. In the evening, Mr John Brown was pleased to listen to the bagpipe. Mr John Brown retired early.
The following year the Tomahawk published the cartoon ‘Where is Britannia?’ showing the throne empty, the royal robes draped over it, the crown insecurely balanced on top and the British lion dozing on the floor. This was followed by ‘A Brown study’, which shows the same scene, except that the crown is at the side, under a glass case, and leaning negligently against the throne is the dour figure of John Brown in Highland dress, pipe in hand, the British lion roaring at him.
The Brown scandal was unhelpful at a time when the public’s patience with Victoria’s seclusion was wearing thin. Republican agitation had been reawakened in the 1860s, fuelled by the Queen’s perceived failure to fulfil her duties and the Prince of Wales’s reputation as a womanizer and a gambler. John Bright, the radical MP for Durham and Manchester, was one of the few who refused to condemn the Queen, when he declared at a Reform meeting:
I am not accustomed to stand up in defence of those who are possessors of crowns; but I could not sit here and hear that observation without a sensation of wonder and of pain. I think there has been by many persons a great injustice done to the Queen in reference to her desolate and widowed position. And I venture to say this, that a woman – be she the Queen of a great realm, or be she the wife of one of your labouring men – who can keep alive in her heart a great sorrow for the lost object of her life and affection, is not at all likely to be wanting in a great and generous sympathy with you.
For the most part, however, radical politicians saw the monarchy as irrational and unnecessary and it was beginning to look as if they were right. Bagehot attributed the appeal of monarchy to the fact that it ‘is a government in which the attention of the nation is concentrated on one person doing interesting actions’, whereas a republic was faceless and therefore of less appeal to the masses. As Charles Bradlaugh, the republican journalist and politician, wrote in 1870: ‘The experience of the last nine years proves that the country can do quite well without a monarch and may therefore save the extra expense of monarchy.’
He had unwittingly put his finger on the real issue. The threat to Victoria’s monarchy came not from republicanism, but from the call for accountability in mundane matters of money and behaviour. Was the public getting value for money? It seemed not. The assumed partiality of the court to Prussia, the aggressor in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, highlighted the fact that Britain was saddled with a lacklustre and expensive royal family allied to unpopular foreign royalty. The overthrow of Napoleon III and the Second Empire in 1871 and the establishment of the Third Republic in France fuelled republican agitation in Britain.
It was at this juncture that Victoria agreed to open Parliament and, in a spectacular piece of misjudgement, brought her begging bowl. She wanted a dowry and an annuity for Princess Louise, who was to marry the son of Scotland’s richest aristocrat, and an allowance for Prince Arthur, who was coming of age. The radicals swung into action. Why could the Queen not provide for her children herself? Was she not in receipt of a civil list amounting to £385,000 annually? There was little sign that she was applying it to her ceremonial role and there was no court to speak of, so what was she doing with it?
Charles Bradlaugh, as President of the London Republican Club, was lecturing on ‘The Impeachment of the House of Brunswick’, later published as a bestselling pamphlet. In September 1871 an anonymous pamphlet entitled What Does She Do with It?’ claimed that public funds to uphold the dignity of the crown were being misappropriated to the Privy Purse. The author, who might have been the Scottish MP G.O. Trevelyan acting on inside information from the treasury, argued that the civil list voted by Parliament gave Parliament the right to enquire into its administration. Sir Charles Dilke, independent radical MP for Chelsea, made the biggest impression with a speech to working men at Newcastle, where he reviewed Trevelyan’s evidence and called for a republic. Trevelyan, meanwhile, demanded a public enquiry.
‘When there is a select committee on the Queen, the charm of royalty will be gone,’ Bagehot had warned in 1867. ‘Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic.’ Gladstone found that regular savings were being made on the civil list and transferred to the Privy Purse, which was not exactly illegal, just against the spirit of the agreement. The principal source of these savings was not the Queen’s retirement from public life, as the royal household had to be maintained whether or not she engaged in public duties, but reforms of the household carried out by Prince Albert in the 1840s and better management of the business affairs of the Duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster, which were yielding increasingly substantial returns. In addition, the Queen had been paying income tax since its introduction by Peel in 1842, but there was an anomaly in that tax, not payable on the actual civil list for household expenses, should have been paid on the savings transferred to the Privy Purse.
It was the most serious crisis of Victoria’s reign. Hitherto, the crown had accepted money in return for turning over its hereditary revenues to Parliament. The sovereign and royal family had not been expected to do anything for the money. They had given up their own hereditary estate and relied on the generosity of Parliament to maintain the dignity of the crown. By the 1860s, however, there was an expectation that the monarchy was to be visibly active, to prove that it was giving value for money. More was expected of it than in previous eras. It was the beginning of public accounting for royal services rendered, which by the reign of Victoria’s great-great-granddaughter, Elizabeth II, progressed to a running tally of public engagements kept by each member of the royal family as demonstrated evidence of public worth.
Victoria, meanwhile, became so wary of parliamentary intrusion into her financial affairs that she grew more frugal than ever. In later years, rather than risk asking Parliament for extra funds, she would meet deficits in the household budget from her own private fortune – she was, after all, the richest person in England by the 1880s. When her bed broke, she refused to incur the expense of having it mended, while visitors to Windsor found newspaper squares rather than lavatory paper in the loos.
At the end of 1871 the monarchy was overwhelmed by a tidal wave of public sympathy for the Prince of Wales, who nearly died of typhoid. That summer Victoria had had a major contretemps with Gladstone when she refused to delay her departure for Balmoral until Parliament was prorogued. ‘The conduct of the Queen … weighs upon me like a nightmare,’ he told his wife. As a constitutional sovereign, Victoria was supposed to act on ministerial advice, but instead the ministers were embarrassed by her refusal to take that advice. ‘We have done all we can. She will decide,’ Gladstone told Sir Henry Ponsonby. ‘Of course, if challenged, I shall take responsibility. But this shield will not wear very long.’ When the Prime Minister visited the Queen at Balmoral, she kept him waiting for several days before receiving him and when he was admitted into the presence he found ‘the repellent power which she so well knows how to use … put into action against me’.
Ironically, Victoria had become truly ill at Balmoral. In September she reported: ‘My foot much swollen, and I could hardly walk a step. The doctors … pronounced it to be severe rheumatic gout, and I was not to walk, indeed I could not.’ The following month, she complained of ‘A most dreadful night of agonising pain. No sedative did any good. I only got some sleep between five and eight this morning. Felt much exhausted on awaking, but there was no fever, and the pain was much less.’ She seems to have lost the use of her hands, as well as her legs. ‘My utter helplessness is a bitter trial, not even being able to feed myself … Was unable all day to eat anything. Dictated my Journal to Beatrice, which I have done most days lately.’ A few days later, she was feeling much better and ‘was able to sign, which is a great thing’.
By the end of November she was well enough to get up and have breakfast with her children, when she received the news of Bertie’s illness. Given her antipathy to her son, the family hesitated to tell her at first. As soon as she heard, she rushed to his side. ‘How very kind of you to visit,’ the genial Bertie told her in a rare moment of lucidity. The Queen stayed at his bedside. The crisis came on 14 December, the tenth anniversary of Albert’s death. Bertie survived.
While Victoria fervently hoped that the close brush with death would persuade her eldest son to mend his ways, Gladstone saw the opportunity to put the Prince of Wales’s recovery to good use. Republicanism had been checked, but only the Queen could unite the divided nation. When the idea of a public thanksgiving was put to Victoria, she was predictably reluctant. Gladstone stressed the precedent of the public thanksgiving held after George III’s recovery in 1789. He had to coax her along, making it look as if the idea had been hers; to claim ministerial control over royal ceremonial would have been to invite disaster.
Persuading the Queen to act took up an inordinate amount of Gladstone’s time, when the Cabinet had other very important business to attend to. Victoria’s preference was for a more low-key affair. Gladstone’s vision was for something spectacular. He prevailed, although he could not persuade the Queen into regal mode. ‘Went to dress, and wore a black silk dress and jacket, trimmed with miniver, and a bonnet with white flowers and a white feather,’ she recorded in her journal when the great day came. She refused to pay for the event out of the civil list, so that, to keep the peace, Gladstone had to persuade Parliament to vote funds for it.
On 27 February 1872, 13,000 dignitaries, including 50 selected workmen, crowded into St Paul’s Cathedral. ‘The deafening cheers never ceased the whole way,’ Victoria wrote in her journal, describing her procession to St Paul’s with the Prince and Princess of Wales, their eldest son Albert Victor, and Princess Beatrice in an open landau. Parliament’s supremacy over the crown was signified by the Speaker in his gold coach at the head of the procession. At Temple Bar the Lord Mayor, in a crimson velvet and ermine robe, went up to the Queen to present the sword, which she touched and returned to him, before passing into the City. Military bands along the route played ‘God Save the Queen’ and ‘God Bless the Prince of Wales’, evoking fresh outbursts of cheering from the thousands of spectators. As the royal party emerged from St Paul’s, Victoria kissed her son’s hand. The crowd applauded delightedly. Back at Buckingham Palace, the Queen and members of her family were cheered on the balcony. ‘Could think and talk of little else, but today’s wonderful demonstration of loyalty and affection, from the very highest to the lowest,’ she recalled in her journal. ‘Felt tired by all the emotion, but it is a day that can never be forgotten!’
Victoria was out of seclusion and it had been a day of healing and national reconciliation.