QUEEN VICTORIA A Personal History

Chapter 37 THE GRIEVING WIDOW

The Prince Consort had once said of the Queen that she 'lived much in the past and in the future, perhaps more than in the present'. After his death she certainly abandoned herself to the past and to her memories of him with a passionate intensity. She could never forget him; no one else should. Even her youngest son, then only eight years old and staying in Cannes for the sake of his precarious health, was told: 'You will therefore sorrow when you know & think that poor Mama is more wretched, more miserable than any being in this World can be! I pine and long for your dearly precious Papa so dreadfully ... You will, my poor little Darling, find Mama old - & thin - & grown weak - & you must try & be a comfort (tho that none can be - for none can replace the All in All I have lost). '¹ She sent the boy two photographs of his father which he was to have framed, 'but not in black', and 'a Locket with beloved Papa's hair' which he was to wear 'attached to a string or chain round [his] neck & a dear pocket handkerchief of beloved Papa's' which he must keep 'constantly with him'.²

Everyone at court had to wear mourning on all social occasions until the end of 1862; and, after 1864, although her maids-of-honour were allowed to wear grey, white, purple and mauve - the last of these colours later being forbidden in its 'fashionable pink tints' - the lady-in-waiting who was in personal attendance upon the Queen was required to wear mourning as deep as Her Majesty's own. All the ladies were, of course, in the words of one of them, 'plunged back into the deepest mourning with jet ornaments' whenever one of the frequent court mournings occurred.³ Even the royal servants were obliged to wear a black crepe band on their left arm until the end of 1869; while the Queen's daughter, Princess Alice, wore a black trousseau at her marriage in July 1862 to Prince Frederick William Louis of Hesse, which was, the Queen herself said, more like a funeral than a wedding. Her mourning writing paper was discarded for a fresh supply with even wider black edges into which the ends of words would disappear, to the exasperation of her secretaries and correspondents, for the rest of her life.[xxxviii]

On the first morning of her widowhood she went into the Blue Room to gaze upon her beloved husband's features. Warned by her doctors not to kiss them, she kissed his clothes instead. She had every part of the room photographed so that it could be preserved exactly as it had been at that moment of the night, ten minutes to eleven on 14 December 1861, when her own life had been shattered. At her command a memorandum was issued by the Lord Chamberlain decreeing that the room 'should remain in its present state and not be made use of in the future'.⁴

She gave orders for Albert's dressing gown and fresh clothes to be laid each evening on his bed and for a jug of steaming hot water to be placed on his washstand. Between the two beds in the room a marble bust of him was placed; above it she had his portrait hung, wreathed with evergreens; and almost every day fresh flowers were strewn beneath it on the pillows. The glass from which he had taken his last dose of medicine was kept on the table beside it where it remained for more than forty years. On his writing table his blotting book lay open with his pen upon it as though it were waiting for him to pick up. Guests at Windsor were required to write their names in his visitors' book as well as in the Queen's, 'as before', Disraeli commented, 'calling on a dead man'.⁵

A notice was fixed to the Blue Room door informing those who passed it that everything within was just as the Prince had left it, although, in fact, the ceiling had been redecorated and much of the china and several of the pictures, as well as the Prince's marble bust, had not been there before. Similar notices were placed outside all the other rooms at Windsor and in the other royal residences to the effect that their contents had been arranged by him.⁶ She had herself photographed gazing up at his bust; and she went to bed each night clasping one of his nightshirts and with a cast of his hand close enough for her to touch it with her fingers. Each morning the four-year-old Princess Beatrice was brought into her room and encouraged to chatter about her father. 'What a pity,' the child once said, 'that I was too little to be at your marriage.'⁷

As at Windsor, so it was at Osborne: in March 1862, Lord Clarendon, during a visit to Osborne, found it 'difficult to believe' that the Prince would not, at any moment, walk into his room where the Queen received him, since 'everything was set out on his table and the pen and his blotting-book, his handkerchief on the sofa, his watch going, fresh flowers in the glass'.⁸

Numerous monuments were erected to his memory: a marble effigy, supported by the wings of four bronze angels, was placed in St George's Chapel, Windsor, in King Henry VIII's tombhouse which was lined with marble, roofed in copper and renamed the Albert Memorial Chapel. A huge statue by Joseph Durham was erected in the Royal Horticultural Gardens in South Kensington where, to the Queen's annoyance, her husband had spent so much time in the last months of his life; and an equestrian bronze by Charles Bacon was unveiled at Holborn Circus.[xxxix] Commemorative stones were laid at Balmoral and in Windsor Park. The first of several municipal tributes, an equestrian statue by Thomas Thornycroft, was unveiled at Wolverhampton in 1866; and Lord Clarendon apprehended the appearance not only of many other statues of 'the late Consort in robes of The Garter upon some curious and non-descript animal that will be called a horse', but also of numerous 'Albert Baths & Washhouses'. The Queen would not object to such memorials, Clarendon added, since she had 'no more notion of what is right and pure in art than she [had] of the Chinese grammar'.⁹

A committee was appointed to discuss a national memorial in London and the Queen chose George Gilbert Scott's Gothic design for what was unveiled ten years later in July 1872 as the Albert Memorial. By then the Royal Albert Hall of Arts and Sciences had already been declared open by the Prince of Wales at Kensington Gore. In the grounds of Frogmore, near the Duchess of Kent's mausoleum, a plot of land was chosen for a far more elaborate royal mausoleum in which Prince Albert was to be buried and she herself would join him when the time came. Inspired by Hawksmoor's mausoleum at Castle Howard which she had seen during her visit to Yorkshire in 1850, by the Gothic mausoleum at Claremont built in memory of Princess Charlotte, and by the family mausoleum at Coburg, which she described in 1860 as being 'beautiful and so cheerful', the Frogmore mausoleum, an Italian Romanesque building with an interior ornamented in the style of Raphael, whom Prince Albert considered the greatest artist of all time, was to cost some £200,000.[xl]¹⁰ Completed almost a year to the day after the Prince's death, it was designed by his artistic adviser, Professor Ludwig Gruner, and the architect, A. J. Humbert. It was consecrated by Samuel Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford, who considered the sight of the grieving Queen and the file of her fatherless children as one of the most touching he had ever witnessed in his life. The next day the Prince's coffin was brought here from St George's Chapel and, later, an effigy of the Prince by Carlo Marochetti was laid above the sarcophagus, a huge block of grey Aberdeen granite.

The Queen was only forty-two but she expected and hoped that soon, perhaps within a year, her own body would be brought here to rest beside her husband's. She was 'naturally much occupied with leaving this world'.

People at court marvelled at her apparent self-possession in the early days of her widowhood, her submission to the divine will. It was as though she were doing all she could to follow the Prince's advice, 'to take things as God sent them', to remember that her 'great task in life' was 'to control [her] feelings'. Sir Charles Phipps reported to Gladstone, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, on the night of the Prince's death, 'The Queen, though in an agony of grief, is perfectly collected, and shows a self control that is quite extraordinary.' The next day Phipps wrote again to say that 'except in the paroxysms of grief she was 'perfectly composed': she was 'determined to do Her duty to the Country'.¹¹ And so she did for a time, conscientiously signing papers within three days of the Prince's death. 'Alas,' Phipps added, 'she has not realized her loss - and when the full consciousness comes upon her - I tremble ... What will happen - where can She look for that support and assistance upon which She has leaned in the greatest and least questions of her life?'

When the full consciousness did come to her, her misery and desolation were painful to witness. She went into 'every detail of the illness', Lord Clarendon said, 'his appearance after death, etc. etc.', which threw her into fresh 'paroxysms of grief'.¹²

'How am I alive after witnessing what I have done?' she asked the Crown Princess. 'Oh! I who prayed daily that we might die together & I never survive Him! I who felt when in those blessed Arms clasped & held tight in the sacred Hours at night - when the world seemed only to be ourselves - that nothing could part us! I felt so vy secure - I always repeated: "And God will protect us", though trembling always for his safety ... It cannot be possible ... Oh! God! Oh! God ... I don't know what I feel. '¹³ Her own death would be the 'greatest blessing', since 'pleasure, joy - all is for ever gone'.

'The poor O[ueen] does not seem to improve,' Lord Clarendon told the Duchess of Manchester in the middle of March 1862, 'her only relief in thinking of her desolate future is the conviction that She shall & must die soon. She is worse off than ordinary persons with relations & friends who in time bring changes & comfort - but she is isolated. '¹⁴

She contemplated suicide, but, so she wrote to her daughter in Germany, 'a Voice told me for His sake - no, still endure.' The Princess herself was in an agony of grief. 'Why has the earth not swallowed me up?' she asked. 'He was too great, too perfect for Earth that adored Father whom I worshipped with more than a daughter's affection. '¹⁵ Night after night she dreamed of him and in one dream she 'took his dear hand and kissed it so long and so often and cried over it and did not like to let it go'.¹⁶

Three months after her father's death, in March 1862, she was granted permission to visit her mother in England. 'Mama is dreadfully sad,' she told her husband. 'She cries a lot; then there is always the empty room, the empty bed, she always sleeps with Papa's coat over her and his dear red dressing-gown beside her and some of his clothes in the bed! ... [She is] as much in love with Papa as though she had married him yesterday ... She feels the same as your little Frauchen... and is always consumed with longing for her husband. '¹⁷

'Truly the Prince was my entire self,' her mother wrote, 'my very life and soul ... I only lived through him My heavenly Angel! Surely there can never have been such a union, such trust and understanding between two people ... I try to feel and think I am living on with him, and that his pure and perfect spirit is leading and inspiring me ... There is no one left to hold me in their arms and press me to their heart ... Oh! how I admired Papa! How in love I was with him! How everything about him was beautiful and precious in my eyes. Oh! how I miss all, all! Oh! Oh! the bitterness of this. '¹⁸

In her misery it distressed her to see the happiness others enjoyed in their marriages and, with characteristic honesty, she admitted it. She was less glad' than she ought to have been to 'see people happy - so odd and wrong! I can't bear to look at a man and his wife walking together.' She could not even now bring herself to show enjoyment of the plays the younger children staged for her. She watched them attentively, reviewing them in her journals; but she explained to Elphinstone that 'if she appeared listless and did not applaud, it was only because the recollections of the happy past when the beloved Prince arranged everything ... weighed her down and it was ALL she could do to sit thro' it.'[xli]

When she left for Balmoral her suffering was worse. She was constantly expecting to hear his footsteps, his voice. 'Oh, darling child,' she wrote to the Crown Princess, 'the agonizing sobs ... the stags' heads - the rooms - blessed, darling Papa's room - then his coats - his caps - kilts - all, all convulsed my poor shattered frame. '¹⁹ The next year she told Queen Augusta that the 'wild, grim, solitary mountains' comforted her. 'The mountains, the woods, the rocks' seemed to 'talk of him'. She wanted to do nothing but 'sit and weep and live only with Him in spirit and take no interest in the things of this earth'. Her misery was becoming 'a necessity'; she 'could not exist without it'.²⁰

The Royal Household began to fear she was going mad. 'The poor Queen,' they would say to each other in nervous concern, while she herself was wont to tap her forehead with the tips of her chubby white fingers as though concerned for her sanity. She confessed to Lord Clarendon that more than once she thought she was indeed going mad. 'My reason, my reason,' she would say. Clarendon himself told Lord Stanley that Prince Albert had once said to him that it was his 'business to watch that mind' of the Queen's 'every hour and every minute - to watch as a cat watches at a mousehole'.²¹

The Queen was often seen to glance at a bust of the Prince before signing an official document; and, it was said, she would sometimes ask softly if he approved of it. 'She believes that his eye is now constantly upon her,' Clarendon commented, 'that he watches over every action of hers & that, in fact, She never ceases to be in communication with his spirit!'²² The Prince had done so much for her in the past, guided her in every way, that she did not know how she could survive without him; and, in her misery, anxiety and irritability, she blamed his fatalistic resignation, his gloomy acceptance of his destiny, for his own death. 'He would die,' she told Lord Derby in her grief. 'He seemed not to care to live.' 'Then she used the words, "He died from want of what they call pluck." ' ²³ As if in reproach at his abandonment of her, she called herself 'a deserted child'.²⁴

Her physical health, so robust in the recent past, suffered grievously in her psychoneurotic state. She felt so listless she could not bring herself to take any exercise, yet she lost weight. She complained of violent nervous headaches; her pulse raced and, almost for the first time in years, she felt the cold. Her memory was failing, she complained; she was 'wasting away'; she was 'a wreck'. Her complete prostration, she told King Leopold, was caused by overwork, over-anxiety and the weight of responsibility and 'constant SORROW and craving for the ONE absorbing object' of her love. She tried to comfort herself by recalling the happiness of the years of her marriage; and she remembered, too, with wry affection, his faults and foibles, his reluctance to abandon conversation with men for the company of ladies in the drawing room, his habit of eating too fast, his practice of falling asleep before she came to bed, his disinclination to talk to her when he was busy reading the newspapers. 'Dear Darling,' she commented, 'I fear I tried him sadly.'

Chapter 38 SEANCES AND SERVICES

The Queen wrapped herself in her grief and longed for the day when her spirit would meet Prince Albert's in a future life after death. She dismissed ill-conceived attempts to comfort her as impatiently as she dismissed the words of a clergyman, who said that she must now consider herself a bride of Christ, as so much 'twaddle': the man 'must have known that he was talking nonsense'. Occasionally, so she told Randall Davidson, the Dean of Windsor, she was assailed by doubts as to whether or not there was, indeed, an afterlife; but these thoughts did not trouble her for long: she spoke more often of her faith in an 'eternal reunion hereafter'; and, in this later life, she was to be rather concerned to reflect what her husband might have to say to her. 'Do you know, my dear,' she was to tell one of her granddaughters, 'I sometimes feel that when I die I shall be just a little nervous about meeting Grandpapa for I have taken to doing a good many things that he would not quite approve of.'

'I feel now to be so acquainted with death,' she wrote to the Princess Royal soon after her mother died, '& to be much nearer that unseen world. '¹ She felt sure that her husband was watching her and that she was in communion with his spirit, though she did not know what other spirits she might encounter and did not care for the thought of meeting some of them. She was said to have objected to the idea of King David being presented to her because of his disgraceful treatment of Uriah the Hittite; and when one of her ladies remarked that they would soon all meet in Abraham's bosom she haughtily replied that she herself would 'not meet Abraham'.² In the afterlife in which the Queen would encounter those 'dear ones waiting', there was no hell and no Devil - belief in these was 'unutterably horrible and revolting'. She was, however, tempted to believe in the occult, in second sight, psychic phenomena, the power of magnetism - she had tried table-turning one evening at Osborne where the table had spun about most convincingly, and she even conducted seances with such members of the household who could be persuaded to take part in them. She also, like Napoleon III, was much struck by coincidences and was superstitious about luck. May was an unlucky month; marriages should not take place in May; and 14 December, the day upon which Prince Albert died, was always for her a day approached with apprehension. The birth of one of her great-grandsons, the future King George VI, on that day consequently caused the family much concern; and the child's grandfather, the Prince of Wales, announced the news of the birth with a kind of apology. His mother was, indeed, 'rather distressed that this happy event should have taken place on a darkly sad anniversary for us';³ but she was mollified on being invited to become godmother to the 'dear little Boy born the day when his beloved great grandfather entered on a new and greater life', and she was additionally pleased to be told he was to be named Albert ('a byeword for all that is great & good'). She gave him a bust of Prince Albert as a christening present.⁴

So far as Christian worship was concerned, the Queen was quite down-to-earth. She was pleased when the Franciscan monks at Cimiez said they would pray for her; but for the rites of their Church - 'strange observances repugnant to all the simplicity of our Saviour's teaching' -she had no taste or inclination, although she did once go to a Roman Catholic service in Switzerland and found it an agreeable experience. Nor could she 'bear to hear the violent abuse of the Catholic religion which is so painful and so cruel towards the many innocent and good Roman Catholics'. She did, however, think that the 'atrocious Catholic clergy' at King Leopold's funeral were 'nasty Beggars'.⁵

She was inclined to reserve her censure for Mr Gladstone's friends, the Tractarians of the Oxford Movement who rejected the Protestant element in Anglicanism in favour of its pre-Reformation Catholic tradition and who aimed at restoring the High-Church ideals of the seventeenth century. Tractarians, she believed, were 'R. Catholics at heart and very insincere as to their professions of attachment' to the Anglican Church. She disliked evangelicals, too, once remarking to Disraeli that 'the extreme Evangelical School' did 'the Established Church as much harm as the High Church'. She considered their tirade against theatres and dancing and their strict Sabbatarianism particularly distasteful. 'I am not at all an admirer or approver of our very dull Sundays,' she once remarked to the Princess Royal, 'for I think the absence of innocent amusements for the poor people a misfortune and an encouragement of vice.' She strongly supported the opening of art galleries and museums on a Sunday and when it was proposed to prohibit by law bands playing in parks on that day she protested to the Prime Minister about the 'incomprehensible blindness' of the proposer of such a ridiculous measure. Going to church on a Sunday was, however, a duty not to be neglected. 'Let me add one word wh. as your Godmother as well as your Grandmother I may,' she once concluded a letter to Princess Victoria of Hesse. 'It is not to neglect going to Church or to read some good & serious religious work, not materialistic & controversial ones - for they are very bad for everyone -but especially for young people.'⁶

Episcopalians came in for the same sort of strictures as Sabbatarians. 'You know,' she remarked one day to Gladstone, 'I am not much of an episcopalian.' 'No, Ma'am,' he replied mournfully, 'I know that well.' Indeed, the Queen went so far as to say that she did not like bishops. She made the remark to Lady Lytton after she had attended a reception for a large number of them, 'a very ugly party', at Lambeth Palace. 'But your Majesty likes some bishops,' Lady Lytton protested, 'for instance, the Bishop of Winchester [Randall Davidson, a clever, persuasive man, "singularly pleasing in both appearance and manner", in the Queen's opinion, who had left the Deanery at Windsor to become Bishop of Rochester before being translated to Winchester] and the Bishop of Ripon [William Boyd Carpenter].' 'Yes,' conceded the Queen, 'I like the man but not the Bishop.'⁷

Indeed, she thought it as well to write to Davidson when he went to Rochester, having previously written very crossly to the Prime Minister for not having done what she had asked him to do and appointed him Bishop of Winchester: 'The Queen must honestly confess that she has never found people promoted to the Episcopate remain what they were before. She hopes and thinks that will not be the case with the Dean.'

If she did not much care for bishops and was a tireless critic of church dignitaries generally, the Queen, with a few notable exceptions, did not much take to many humbler Anglican clergymen either. She once remarked of a man, a 'really most talented person' and 'good looking besides' who was appointed tutor to her youngest son, that the 'only objection' she had to him was that he was a clergyman;⁸ and on another occasion she wondered 'why the clergy should go fussing about the poor or servants... The servants are very good people. Why can't they be left alone?'*[xlii]⁹

Her journal contains many references to 'terribly long services' and tediously long sermons of which she grew increasingly intolerant in her old age. The Duke of Portland recorded that A. V. Baillie, later to be Dean of Windsor, but then a young curate, once asked Sir Henry Ponsonby for his advice about a sermon he was to preach in the Queen's presence. 'It doesn't much matter what you say,' Ponsonby told him, 'because her Majesty is too deaf to hear; but on no account let it last for more than five minutes.'¹⁰

All in all she felt more at home in a Scottish kirk - 'the real and true stronghold of Protestantism' - than in any other place of worship. 'I have always,' she once declared to a deputation from the Church of Scotland, 'been devoted to Scotland and to the Church.' 'I am nearly a Dissenter,' she confessed, 'or rather more a Presbyterian.' She found the simplicity of the services at Crathie and the quiet devotion of the congregation there most moving; and she caused some consternation among the members of her household by declaring that she intended to take communion at Crathie and expected them, as well as the servants at Balmoral, to do the same. When her youngest son objected she was furious. 'Let me now more strongly and emphatically point out to you, that it is your sacred duty to take the sacrament with me,' she told him ... 'I have never known any one refuse to take the Sacrament with a Parent - and especially the Head of the Country - if asked to do so.'¹¹

She wrote gratefully of the 'admirable' sermons of her 'dear friend' and chaplain the Revd Norman McLeod, listening to which she would sometimes nod in agreement and approval. 'Every one came back delighted,' she wrote after one service conducted by McLeod whose prayers, she said, 'gave me a lump in my throat. How satisfactory it is to come back from church with such feelings. '¹²

She was equally impressed by another sermon, preached the following year by the Revd John Laird, parish minister of Errol, who 'electrified all present by a most admirable and beautiful Sermon, which lasted nearly an hour, but which kept one's attention rivetted.'¹³ This was in 1855. It was very rarely thereafter that she would sit patiently through a sermon half as long. She did not, as Queen Elizabeth I was known to do, interrupt the parson's discourse; but she would make it quite clear from her expression when he had said enough.

Chapter 39 PRINCESS ALEXANDRA

Although she had been reluctant to depart from the place where her beloved husband lay awaiting his funeral, the Queen left for Osborne five days after his death. She looked utterly miserable during the crossing, according to her lady-in-waiting, the Duchess of Atholl, who described the 'desolate look of that young [42-year-old] face in Her Widow's cap! for somehow the Queen looked like a child'. She held the Duchess in a 'passionate embrace'; and the older woman thought 'What was there that I would not do for her.'¹

At Osborne she tried to deal with papers and despatches, determined, as she said, to do her duty, struggling to understand the difficulties which the Prince would so carefully have explained to her, the words seeming to swim before her eyes. As at Windsor and, later at Balmoral, she could not escape from the fear that she might go mad.

She felt she could not bear to see her Ministers alone; and she told the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, that they would have to conduct their business either through Princess Alice or General Grey, George Anson's successor as the Prince's Private Secretary and now her own.

When the Prime Minister pressed her to accept the fact that this method of conducting business was impossible she gave way with clearly stated reluctance. But she insisted that she was not up to the strain of attending meetings of the Privy Council. In this difficulty a strange compromise was reached. The recently appointed Clerk of the Council was Arthur Helps, an astute, cultivated and tactful man whom the Queen came to like and to trust; and it was agreed that he and the requisite number of councillors should stand in one room while the Queen should sit in the next with the door between them open. She would then authorize Helps to give her consent to the matters laid before the councillors for their approval.

She was to be a similarly remote presence on the occasion of the Prince of Wales's marriage to Princess Alexandra which was to take place on 5 March 1863.

In the months immediately following her husband's death, the Queen had made no bones of her conviction that - as she said to Lord Hertford one day - the Prince Consort had been 'killed by that dreadful business at the Curragh'.² She asked Vicky to tell Stockmar so: 'There must be no delusion about that - it was so; he was struck down ... Oh! that cross.'³

She found it impossible to look at her eldest son 'without a shudder'. She could scarcely bear to be in the same room with him, she confessed to her daughter, the Crown Princess. 'He does not know that I know all - Beloved Papa told him that I could not be told all the disgusting details ... Tell him [the Crown Prince Frederick, who had made an appeal to the Queen on his brother-in-law's behalf] that I try to employ him, but I am not hopeful.'⁴

The Prince Consort's friend, Colonel Francis Seymour, encouraged the Queen to believe that the Prince of Wales's 'fall' was, in reality, no more than 'a youthful error that very few young men escape', that it was 'almost impossible' to hope that the Prince would be one of them, and that the father's 'extraordinary pureness of mind' had led him to exaggerate the seriousness of what most other men would consider a venial fault. But the Queen would not be persuaded, and when the Crown Princess urged her not to be so hard upon the boy - to accept the fact that he knew he was 'neither like you nor Papa'; he could not help it - she replied:

All you say about poor Bertie is right and affectionate in you; but if you had seen what I saw, if you had seen Fritz struck down, day by day get worse and finally die, I doubt if you could bear the sight of the one who was the cause; or if you would not feel as I do, a shudder. This dreadful dreadful cross kills me!5

Her distress was made all the more difficult to bear because the contemplation of her son's future enjoyment of his young and attractive wife made her own loss so painful to remember. She confessed to her daughter that Bertie's 'prospect of opening happiness of married life' wrung her 'poor heart' which seemed 'transfixed with agonies of longing!' 'I am alas! not old,' she wrote to her, 'and my feelings are strong and warm; my love is ardent.'⁶

The Prince did what he could to heal the breach between himself and his mother, writing letters for her, letting her know that he shared her grief for the loss of 'one of the best and kindest fathers'. But it was all to no avail; and relations between mother and son became so bad that the Prime Minister came to see the Queen to tell her that the country was 'fearful [they] were not on good terms'. The Prince was so much away from home there was talk of a serious estrangement. The Queen protested that this was not so and the Prince was 'a very good and dutiful son'. Certainly he was much away from home, but this was 'unavoidable, as Bertie's living in the house was not a good thing'.

In writing to her daughter, the Queen was more open. Contact with her son was 'more than ever unbearable' to her, she admitted. She had decided it would be best if he left the country again for a time. His father had planned that his education ought to be completed by a tour of Palestine and the Near East, and now was a suitable time for him to embark upon it.

So, in February 1862, accompanied by General Bruce, he set out for Venice by way of Vienna. The 'poor Boy' was 'low and upset' when he wished his mother goodbye. So was she; and he returned for a moment after he had left her room, close to tears. He had felt his father's death far more deeply that she had supposed, and was distressed to leave her, knowing that in her misery she had almost grown to hate him.

The Q: and the P: of W: are as bad as ever if not worse [Lord Clarendon told the Duchess of Manchester on the authority of King Leopold shortly before the Prince's departure]. And all his efforts to improve them have been fruitless - it seems an antipathy that is incurable but quite justifiable - it is entirely her fault as the poor boy asks nothing better than to devote himself to comforting his Mother & with that object would be delighted to give up his foreign expedition but she wouldn't hear of it & seems only to wish to get rid of him. The Q:'s conduct in the matter is hardly sane but, as we know, it has never been otherwise, the eccentricity cannot be attributed to her misfortune but if it goes on & she lives it will produce a most painful state of things.7

On his return from his tour in June 1862 the Prince was profoundly relieved to find that his mother appeared to have overcome those feelings of deep resentment and dislike which had so distressed him at the time of his father's death. Indeed, she seemed actually glad to have him home again. She confessed that she was at first 'much upset at seeing him' because 'his beloved father was not there to welcome him back'. But he was so much improved, she thought, looking 'so bright and healthy' and being 'most affectionate: the tears came into his eyes' when he saw her. His time away had 'done him so much good', his mother continued a few days later; and he went on 'being as good, amiable and sensible' as anyone could have wished. Improved 'in every respect', he was 'so kind and nice to the younger children, more serious in his ways and views'. She was especially pleased to note that he was 'very distressed about General Bruce' who, having contracted a fever in the marshes of the Upper Jordan, had died soon after his return to England in his sister's rooms in St James's Palace.

The Prince was now twenty-one years old and his mother was anxious that there should be no further delay in his marriage. He, too, she was thankful to say, seemed 'most anxious' to make his formal proposal to Princess Alexandra, for whom he had bought a 'number of pretty things' on his travels. The Queen, however, thought that before any proposal was made, Princess Alexandra's family should be told that the Prince of Wales was a 'mauvais sujet'. So the Crown Princess was instructed to let the Princess's mother, Princess Christian, know that 'wicked wretches' had led the 'poor innocent Boy into a scrape' which had caused his parents the 'deepest pain'. She was told to add that both his parents had 'forgiven him this (one) sad mistake', that his mother was very confident that he would make 'a steady Husband', and that she looked to his wife 'as being HIS SALVATION'.⁸

This message was accordingly passed on to Princess Christian who was further assured, without too strict a regard for accuracy, that the Prince was 'very domestic and longed to be at home'. So arrangements for the marriage went ahead, and the Queen meanwhile used a journey to Coburg to revisit the places where her husband had lived as a child as an excuse to meet Princess Alexandra and her parents at King Leopold's palace at Laeken.

She was immediately taken with her proposed daughter-in-law whom she found as lovely as the Crown Princess had said she was, 'with such a beautiful, refined profile and quiet lady-like manner'. The Queen was accordingly gratified to receive a letter from her son saying that he had proposed to her.

She immediately said yes [the Prince reported] ... I then kissed her hand and she kissed me. We then talked for some time and I said I was sure you would love her as your own daughter and make her happy in the new home, though she would find it very sad after the terrible loss we had sustained. I told her how very sorry I was that she could never know dear Papa. She said she regretted it deeply and hoped he would have approved of my choice. I cannot tell you how happy I feel.9

'May he be only worthy of such a jewel,' the Queen commented apprehensively. 'There is the rub!' She let it be known that, although they were engaged, there must be no question of their being left alone together, except 'in a room next to the Princess's mother's' and then 'with the door open and for a short while'. This is how her own courtship had been conducted after she herself had proposed to the Prince's father. Also, Princess Alexandra must come over to England by herself before the marriage so that she could be warned 'not to use her influence to make the Prince a partisan in the political questions now unhappily in dispute' between her country and Germany, since this would 'irritate all the Queen's German connections and create family feuds - destructive of all family comfort and happiness'.

The Princess was reluctant to come, not wanting it to appear that she was being summoned on approval and 'terribly frightened' of being left alone with the Queen for long. Both the Prince of Wales and the King of the Belgians tried rather diffidently and wholly unsuccessfully to persuade the Queen not to subject the Princess to such embarrassment; but the Queen was adamant. 'I should see the girl,' she said, 'so that I could judge, before it is too late, whether she will suit me.'¹⁰

So, while the Prince was sent abroad again, Princess Alexandra came to England and listened to the Queen's lectures with tactful acquiescence. She concealed the resentment which she subsequently admitted she had felt that her father, who had brought her over to England, had - for want of an invitation to stay at Osborne - been obliged to put up at a hotel; and that her mother, from whom she had never been parted before, had not been asked to come to England at all. She was polite, charming, understanding, affectionate; and the Queen was more delighted with her than ever, particularly when, after listening to many stories about the Prince Consort, the Princess burst into tears at an account of his death. 'How He would have doted on her and loved her,' the Queen wrote, paying her the highest compliment she could.¹¹

She certainly adored her now herself. 'I can't say how I and we all love her!' she told the Crown Princess. 'She is so good, so simple, unaffected, frank, bright and cheerful, yet so quiet and gentle that her [companionship] soothes me. Then how lovely!'¹²

When Princess Alexandra, now known as Alix, returned to England three days before the wedding it was clear, however, that the sad memories aroused by what was to take place in St George's Chapel were to cast their gloom over what the Queen professed would be 'the only ray of happiness in her life since her husband's death'. She was too 'desolate' to come down to dinner, which she had served to her and a lady-in-waiting in a different room; and was 'much moved' when, to show her sympathy with the Queen's distress, 'Alix knocked at the door, peeped in and came and knelt before [her] with that sweet, loving expression which spoke volumes.' The Queen kissed her 'again and again'.¹³

Princess Alexandra was 'much moved' herself, so the Queen recorded, when, the day before the wedding, she took the bride and bridegroom to the mausoleum at Frogmore. 'I opened the shrine and took them in ... I said, "He gives you his blessing!" and joined Alix's and Bertie's hands, taking them both in my arms. It was a very touching moment and we all felt it.'¹⁴

The Queen, 'very low and depressed', according to Lady Augusta Bruce, remained preoccupied with thoughts of her husband even on the day of the wedding. She had herself photographed sitting down in front of the bridal pair, looking at neither of them but gazing instead at a marble bust of the Prince Consort.

She had decided that she could not bring herself to take part in the procession to the chapel, nor to discard her mourning for the day. She would continue to wear the black streamers of widowhood and her black widow's cap with a long white veil. She put on the badge of the Order of the Garter that her 'beloved one had worn' and a miniature of 'his noble features.' She proceeded to the Chapel from the deanery by a specially constructed covered way and entered directly into the high oak closet on the north side of the altar which Henry VIII had built so that Catherine of Aragon could watch the ceremonies of the Order of the Garter.¹⁵

Sitting in this closet, she was 'agitated and restless', Lady Augusta Bruce recorded, moving her chair, putting back her long streamers, asking questions of the Duchess of Sutherland. Her expression was 'profoundly melancholy'. When the organ played the first anthem and Jenny Lind sang the chorale which had been composed by Prince Albert, she looked across at the new East window and reredos which the Dean and Canons had erected in his memory and seemed 'transfixed', suffering indescribably. Charles Kingsley, one of the Queen's Chaplains in Ordinary, who was 'exactly opposite to her the whole time', saw her throw back her head and look 'up and away with a most painful' expression on her face. Norman McLeod, Dean of the Chapel Royal, who was standing next to Kingsley, touched him on the arm, and, with tears in his eyes, whispered in his 'broad Scotch', 'See, she is worshipping him in spirit!'¹⁶

In the congregation below the Queen's closet, her daughters were in tears; the Archbishop of Canterbury made rather heavy weather of announcing the bride's six Christian names; the bridesmaids were, in Lady Geraldine Somerset's opinion, 'eight as ugly girls as you could wish to see'; the Knights of the Garter hurried down the aisle in a kind of gaggle instead of proceeding decorously two by two; and Benjamin Disraeli was seen to receive a frigid glance from the Queen for having raised his eye-glass in the direction of her closet: he 'did not venture', so he told a friend, to use his glass again.¹⁷ There was only one really embarrassing moment, however; and that was when the bridegroom's four-year-old nephew, the future Kaiser Wilhelm II, who was wearing Highland dress, decided to enliven the proceedings by trying to throw the cairngorm from the head of his dirk across the choir. He had already caused great consternation by hurling his aunt's muff out of the carriage window and by addressing the Queen familiarly as 'Duck'.¹⁸ He now created further disturbance by turning on his uncles, Prince Alfred and Prince Leopold, who tried to restrain his bad behaviour in the chapel, and by biting them both as hard as he could on their legs.

After the ceremony a luncheon was held for the royal guests, but the Queen did not attend it, again preferring to eat alone. Afterwards, at about four o'clock, from a window in the Grand Corridor, she watched the bridal carriage set off for Windsor station. She then walked down the path to the mausoleum at Frogmore, to pray alone, 'by that blessed resting-place'.¹⁹

On their return to Windsor after a week's honeymoon at Osborne, the Queen was pleased with the look of them both. 'Alix looked so sweet and lovely at luncheon,' she recorded the day they arrived back at the Castle, 'and Bertie so brightened up.'

She was not pleased with either of them, however, when they, like most people in the country, made clear their support of Denmark in that country's quarrel with Germany over the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein which had been ruled for years by the Kings of Denmark but which the Germans considered they had every right to annex. The problem was an extremely complicated one, so complicated, in fact, that Lord Palmerston observed in a celebrated comment that there were only three people who had ever understood it, the Prince Consort, who was dead, a German professor who had gone mad, and he himself who had quite forgotten what it was all about. What was certain, at least, was that the Queen, having regard to the fact that the inhabitants of the Duchies were of largely German stock, supported German claims, as she had no doubt Prince Albert would have done. Indeed, she had recently declared that the 'German element' was the one which she wished 'to be cherished and kept up' in the 'beloved home' which she had shared with her husband; and she had told her daughter, the Crown Princess, that she much regretted that the Prince of Wales never wrote to Princess Alexandra in 'anything but English'. 'I hope,' she wrote to her daughter after the Prince of Wales had visited her in Berlin, 'that you have Germanized Bertie as much as possible.'²⁰

Princess Alexandra, naturally sympathetic towards Denmark when German armies invaded the country of her birth, was, on the other hand, outspokenly anti-German. Her attitude was warmly endorsed by her husband. 'This horrible war will be a stain for ever on Prussian history,' the Prince of Wales wrote in a letter to Mrs Bruce, his late Governor's widow, 'and I think it is very wrong of our government not to have interfered before now.'

'The dreadful war in Denmark causes both the Princess and myself great anxiety,' the Prince wrote in a letter to Lord Spencer, his Groom of the Stole, 'and the conduct of the Prussians and the Austrians is really quite scandalous.'²¹ Such remarks were not only addressed to his friends. The Prussian Ambassador, the disagreeable Count Bernstorff, felt constrained to register a formal complaint about the Prince's behaviour which was matched by that of the Princess, who pointedly refused to speak to Bernstorff after she had observed him declining to raise his glass in a toast to the King of Denmark.²²

The Prince and Princess were resolved not to be silenced. Nothing the Queen could do prevented them from speaking out. So strongly did the Prince feel, in fact, that he even discussed what he considered to be the pusillanimous policies of the Government with the leading members of the Opposition after his offer to act as an intermediary between London and Copenhagen had been treated - as the Queen instructed that it should be treated - 'with extreme caution'. 'Oh,' the Queen lamented to her daughter in Germany, 'if Bertie's wife were only a good German and not a Dane! ... It is terrible to have the poor boy on the wrong side, and aggravates my sufferings greatly.'²³

With her eldest son being so troublesome, with his wife expecting a baby (a weak thing born prematurely as a result, so it was said, of her distress over her country's plight), with her daughter, the Crown Princess, writing angry letters about England's attitude towards Prussia, with the Crown Prince fighting in the Prussian army - and, to his brother-in-law's disgust, wearing on his Prussian uniform 'a most objectionable ribbon which he received for his deeds of valour ???' - and with Palmerston and Lord Russell, those 'two dreadful old men' in open sympathy with Denmark, the Queen prohibited all further mention of the Schleswig -Holstein business at Windsor and everywhere else.

Chapter 40 THE RECLUSE

Active as she had been in attempting to guide her Government's foreign policy and priding herself on having 'the eyes of Argus in spite of [her] broken heart', the Queen continued to live, so far as the outside world was concerned, in impenetrable and mournful seclusion.

A few months before Prince Albert's death, the poet, A. J. Munby, had seen her on her way to and from Parliament, 'in ermine robe and diamond coronet, looking well and young. Great crowd and more cheering than I have heard before - one workman near me very enthusiastic, shouting, "England's Crown for ever!" as he held his hat up.'¹

Now the months went by and neither Household nor Ministers could persuade her to show herself in public. Charles Grey, her Private Secretary, was blamed by the Cabinet for not doing more to urge her to do so, since he was known to be as close to her as any member of her Household. Indeed, she herself had written to him to say that she could not deny he was her 'main support'; and when he was away, she added, 'she always feels additionally anxious. She is not worrying herself now [ January 1863], & is calmer; but her constant & ever increasing grief - added to a terribly nervous temperament by nature (which her precious Husband knew but too well & often had to suffer ... ) - prevents her taking anything calmly.'²

Grey did what he could to persuade her to emerge from her seclusion, knowing quite well that, as her second daughter, Princess Alice, assured him, and as he himself observed at a ghillies' ball at Balmoral, the Queen's health was not really as delicate as she claimed it was. 'Princess Alice also says that the Queen owned to her that she was afraid of getting too well - as if it was a crime ... She is so nice & touching in her manner that it is difficult to find the heart to urge her to do anything she does not like - but after the next anniversary, we must all try, gently, to get her to resume her old habits. '³

Grey was reluctant to press her too hard, since he knew this would make her all the more determined to cling to her privacy, and that when she was urged to make a public appearance she would, as likely as not, turn to her doctors for a reason for refusing. The Queen's physician, William Jenner, who was created a baronet in 1868, was much criticized for not giving Ministers a more accurate account of his patient's state of health. When pressed on this point by Lord Halifax, the Lord Privy Seal, he protested, 'But how can I? Isn't it better to say the Queen can't do so and so because of her health - which is to a certain extent true - than to say she won't?' It was much easier, in fact, to agree with her own diagnoses than to antagonize her by dissent.⁴

Lord Halifax, commenting on the Queen's obstinacy and nervousness, spoke of some 'evidence of insanity'. However, since she had 'always been much the same in these matters', there was no need to fear that her mind would grow worse.⁵ Yet she herself instructed Jenner to tell Lord Derby that 'any great departure from her usual way of life, or more than ordinary agitation, might produce insanity'.

Jenner agreed that the Queen's nerves were 'a species of madness' against which it was 'hopeless to contend'.⁶ Her insistence on seclusion was due to 'nervousness'. He pointed out how hard she worked at her papers, how diligently she went through her despatch boxes even in Scotland where it was really necessary she should go for periods of relaxation, since she needed an 'entire change of air at least twice a year'. The Scottish writer and biographer, Sir Theodore Martin, confirmed how hard she worked at her papers. Martin had sprained his leg while skating on the Isle of Wight and the Queen had sat by him and read to him every day 'as if she had been his mother'. 'They had been daily in close intercourse at Osborne' so Martin had had an opportunity of 'seeing her in her room surrounded by the despatch boxes which [came] to her twice a day from London'.

'From 7.30 a.m. when she gets up, to twelve at night or 12.30,' so Martin told A. J. Munby, 'she is continually at work, except the hours of meal & exercise, and half an hour after dinner, when someone reads to her.'⁷

Even so, as Jenner knew, she was inclined to overstate her case, talking and writing of 'constant incessant labour' and being 'overwhelmed with business', protesting, as she did to the Crown Princess, how impossible it was for her to bear the 'noise and excitement' of public appearances 'without feeling really ill'. It was all very well for General Grey to refer in private to the 'Royal Malingerer', and for Lord Clarendon to speak of 'Eliza' as being 'roaring well' and able to do 'everything she likes and nothing she doesn't'. Jenner remained convinced of the real distress which lay behind her almost hysterical outbursts, her wild protests against being 'driven to desperation by the want of consideration shown by the public for her health and strength', against her being required to work and drudge 'from morning to night' in total disregard of the danger of a 'complete breakdown of her nervous system', against her - 'a poor weak woman shattered by grief and anxiety and by nature terribly nervous' -being 'dictated to by public clamour into doing what she physically CANNOT', against all 'unreasonable demands from which she [expected] Ministers to protect her'.

The people of the country began to grumble about a Queen who might just as well be dead for all they heard about her. Lord Torrington, one of her lords-in-waiting, complained to General Grey that there was a 'considerable danger' of the public ceasing to take any interest in the monarchy, while the 'ignorant mass' might well come to believe that 'Royalty [was] of no value'. 'There is not a tradesman in London,' so Torrington thought, 'who does not believe he is damaged by the Queen not coming to London.'⁸ Newspapers took up and endorsed these complaints. The Globe and The Times criticized her for retreating to Balmoral when she should have been available to her Ministers six hundred miles further south - comments which induced her to instruct General Grey to 'tell her when such articles are in the papers, as then she won't read them'.⁹ A Member of Parliament went so far as to ask in the Commons 'whether it is the intention of Her Majesty's Government, out of consideration to Her Majesty's health, comfort and tranquility ... to advise Her Majesty to abdicate'.¹⁰

This drew forth from the Queen a characteristic protest:

She thinks it vy important that the question of her state of health once for all shld be understood - It is simply this: The Queen's health - & nerves - require in the spring time a short interval of bracing mountain air & comparative quiet - or she must break down completely & if the public will not take her - as she is - she must give all up - & give it to the Pr of Wales - No doubt they wld wish her to be always in London for their convenience ... but the Queen can't... The Queen's looks belie her & nobody believes how she suffers.11

In March 1864 a large poster, fixed to the railings of Buckingham Palace, announced to passers-by that 'these commanding premises' were 'to be let or sold, in consequence of the late occupant's declining business'.

That spring the Queen was persuaded to make an appearance at a flower show in the Royal Horticultural Gardens; and in June she steeled herself to take a drive from Buckingham Palace to Paddington in an open carriage and, although the experience was 'very painful', she was deeply gratified to see how pleased people were to see her again. A fortnight before this rare excursion she had received a letter from King Leopold urging her to show herself more in this way. Well knowing the effect it would have upon her, he reminded her that the Prince of Wales and his wife - now living in grand style at Marlborough House with a household of over a hundred persons, including scarlet-coated and powdered footmen, pages in blue and black, and innumerable maids - were 'constantly before the public in EVERY IMAGINABLE SHAPE and CHARACTER', filling 'entirely the public mind'.¹² Having taken her uncle's advice not to let her heir and his wife overshadow her, she noted complacently how the people stopped to look at her and ran after her carriage when she did bring herself to appear in public, this, 'naturally', they did not do for them.

The Queen drew the line, however, at opening Parliament. When this was proposed to her in 1864; she told the Prime Minister that such a function was 'totally out of the question'. It had been difficult enough to do so when she had had 'the support of her dear husband, whose presence alone seemed a tower of strength, and by whose dear side she felt safe and supported under every trial'. Even with that support she had been 'always terribly nervous on all public occasions, but especially at the opening of Parliament, which was what she dreaded for days, and hardly ever went through without suffering from headaches before or after the ceremony. '¹³

This was true: she had once told Prince Albert that on every such occasion she was so nervous it was as though it were the first time she had endured it; and Lady Lyttelton had once noticed at a prorogation ceremony how uncontrollably she was trembling. Now that her husband's support had gone, no child could feel 'more shrinking and nervous than the poor Queen' when she had to 'do anything'.

Apart from an appearance at Wellington College - the public school founded as a memorial to the great Duke, with which her husband, as President of the Governors, had been closely associated and to which one of her grandsons was sent - the Queen was very rarely seen beyond the walls of Windsor Castle, Buckingham Palace and Osborne in 1864. Nor was she in 1865 when, in the spring of that year, her life, so she lamented to her eldest daughter, was still 'bereft of joy', still - as she wrote to the widow of Abraham Lincoln who was assassinated in April - 'utterly broken-hearted' by the loss of her 'own beloved husband', 'the light of [her] life'.¹⁴ But during the next year she brought herself to appear in public rather more often: she went to the Royal Academy, the South Kensington Museum - where she was intrigued by an exhibition of porcelain painted by 'ladies or at least women' - and to the Zoological Gardens. She went to inspect a parade of troops at Aldershot; she walked round the workhouse at Old Windsor - where she was sorry to see men and their wives housed in separate quarters in their old age - and was shown over the prison at Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight where some prisoners knelt before her in tears, 'sobbing for pardon', and others, mostly Roman Catholic and Irish women, were 'so unmanageable & excited that nothing could be done with them'.¹⁵

She drove over from Balmoral to attend the Highland Gathering at Braemar and to open a waterworks at Aberdeen where she was actually induced to make a speech. She went to Wolverhampton in the royal train from which she alighted with 'trembling knees' to unveil a statue of Prince Albert; and, anxious to obtain a dowry for Princess Helena, who was to marry the impecunious Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg that year, as well as an annuity for Prince Alfred, shortly to be created Duke of Edinburgh, who had celebrated his twenty-first birthday the year before, she actually agreed to open Parlia- ment in February 1866 for fear lest the House of Commons made difficulties about granting money for the children of a Queen neglecting her duty. But it would, she protested, be a terrible experience to be 'ALONE in State' and exhibited as though she were an oddity or attraction in some kind of show, 'the spectacle of a poor, broken-hearted widow, nervous and shrinking dragged in deep mourning' to what she 'could only compare to an execution'.¹⁶ She would force herself to go, however, though definitely not in the state coach.

In the event she was quite as nervous as she had expected to be, unable to eat most of her luncheon and afraid that she was going to faint as she entered the Chamber and felt 'all eyes fixed' upon her in the intimidating silence. She was clothed all in black with a black veil and black widow's cap surmounted by a small coronet of diamonds and sapphires.

Today the Queen opened Parliament [A. J. Munby recorded in his diary] ... Very stout, very red in the face, she looked, bowing at the carriage window. She was well received, but not so warmly as the Princess of Wales who followed ... It was a good humoured crowd.17

'When I entered the House [which was very full],' she wrote in her journal that night, 'I felt as if I should faint. All was silent and all eyes fixed upon me, and there I sat alone.' The robes she had worn before her widowhood were draped over the throne, next to which stood an empty chair. While the Lord Chancellor read the speech which she could not bring herself to deliver, she stared ahead, motionless, her face like a mask, willing herself not to break down.¹⁸

On the way back to Buckingham Palace she gave vent to her relief in a stream of talk to her daughters, Princesses Louise and Helena, who were sitting opposite her in the carriage. Later Princess Alice wrote to congratulate her mother on her 'great effort' which would bring its reward. 'Think of the pride and pleasure it would have given darling Papa,' she said, 'the brave example to others not to shirk their duty. '¹⁹

The Queen steeled herself to open Parliament again in February the next year. But afterwards she wished she had not done so:

Yesterday was a wretched day, and altogether I regret I went [to open Parliament] - 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 [the Parliamentary Reform Act extending the suffrage was passed in August that year]. There were many, nasty faces - and I felt it painfully. At such times the Sovereign should not be there. Then the weather being very bad -the other people could not remain to drown all the bad signs. Of course it was only bad people.20

Chapter 41 DISRAELI

One of the ordeals which the Queen found most trying was the inescapable and constant tribulation of having to grow accustomed to new men in her Cabinet, for she had always hated change and clung to old friends with an almost passionate intensity. Six months after her husband's death she had asked Lord Clarendon to warn Lord Derby, the Leader of the Opposition, that her mind was so strained that a change of Government might well be 'more than her reason could stand'.

She also contrived to ensure that her Household remained comparatively stable, even though this eventually entailed being served by increasingly elderly men, several of whom were deaf. General Grey, the Queen's Private Secretary, was still in office when he died aged sixty-six in 1870. Henry Ponsonby, who succeeded him, remained Private Secretary until he suffered a stroke in 1895 in his seventieth year. Sir Thomas Biddulph, Keeper of the Privy Purse, was also in his seventieth year when he died at Abergeldie Mains near Balmoral; and Sir James Clark was well over seventy when he was treating the Prince Consort in his last illness. Sir Arthur Bigge, Ponsonby's successor, later Lord Stamfordham, remained the Queen's Private Secretary until her death.

Changes in her household were nearly always opposed, often successfully. When at the age of forty-one, in November 1863, Lady Augusta Bruce decided to marry - and had accepted the 48-year-old Canon Arthur Penryn Stanley of all people - the Queen did not trouble to hide her displeasure and mortification: 'Lady Augusta has most unnecessarily decided to marry (!!!)' she told King Leopold, 'I thought she never would leave me![xliii]... It has been my greatest sorrow and trial since my misfortune! ... She will remain in my service and be often with me, but it cannot be the same, for her first duty is now to another.'[xliv]¹

When a far less valued lady left to get married, the Queen admitted that she grudged 'any change in [her] Household now'. Fortunately most of her ladies were widows and there could be no question of their remarrying: she was firmly opposed to any such union and her ladies were left in no doubt as to where their duty lay - to the memories of their late husbands and to herself. She could scarcely prevent Lady Augusta's marriage; but she did manage to postpone for three years the marriage of one of her equerries, Henry Ponsonby's son, Frederick, to a colonel's pretty daughter with whom he had fallen deeply in love, on the grounds that a man 'always told his wife everything and therefore all her private affairs would get known all over London'. When the Queen's opposition to the marriage was at last overcome, Ponsonby was made to understand that he could never expect to be given a house.²

Over government changes the Queen could exercise no such control as she endeavoured to exercise in her Household; and the prospect of having to deal with a new Minister always filled her with the utmost alarm and foreboding. When Lord Palmerston died in October 1865 and Lord Russell succeeded him as Prime Minister she was distraught, dreading the change more than words could express, although, so she now told King Leopold, she had never really liked Palmerston any more than she did Russell. 'He had many valuable qualities,' she wrote of 'Pilgerstein', 'though many bad ones, and we had God knows! terrible trouble with him ... I never could the least respect him, nor could I forget his conduct on certain occasions to my Angel.'³

No sooner had she found Russell not nearly as difficult as she had feared he might be than his Government was defeated. Aghast at the thought of having to accept a Conservative Government under Lord Derby, she at first refused to accept Russell's resignation; and, when she was persuaded that she would have to do so, she gave way with a decidedly ill grace, complaining that all these changes were 'very trying'. It was trying even having to accept Benjamin Disraeli, a man whom Prince Albert had described as being 'without one single element of the gentleman in his composition', as Chancellor of the Exchequer once again, though she had recently had cause to modify her earlier view that Disraeli was 'detestable, unprincipled, reckless, & not respectable'. He had certainly paid a most admirable public tribute to her husband whose acquaintance, he privately assured her, was 'one of the most satisfactory incidents of his life'. The Prince was, he had said, 'the only person' whom he had 'ever known who realized the Ideal... There was in him an union of the manly graces and sublime simplicity of chivalry with the intellectual splendour of the Attic Academe.'⁴

Mr Disraeli had also spoken most movingly about the Albert Memorial, and, when he had become Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons for the first time under Derby, he had impressed the Queen by the clarity and vividness of the parliamentary reports which it was his duty - his 'pleasure', he said - to send her. But he was a very odd person; so was his wife; and, while she felt assured of his devotion to herself and the Crown, she had never been quite at ease in his presence. This was soon to change.

In February 1868, after Lord Derby's resignation, Disraeli became Prime Minister. It was, the Queen thought, 'a proud thing for a Man "risen from the people" to have obtained!'⁵ And if he was scarcely 'a man of the people', his father being a distinguished and well-to-do man of letters and his mother descended from one of the most ancient of Jewish families, it was certainly a remarkable achievement for Disraeli to have reached, as he put it himself, 'the top of the greasy pole'. For he was undoubtedly an outsider in the hierarchy of his party. Not only his race and tastes and manner but even his education separated him from his colleagues: apart from the Lord Chancellor, Lord Chelmsford, who had been educated at a naval school at Gosport, he was the only member of his Cabinet who had not attended a well-known public school: two had been to Rugby, one to Shrewsbury, the remaining nine to Eton.

From the beginning he set out to woo and flatter the Queen with an infallible instinct for the phrase, the gesture, the compliment, the overture that would most delight her. He was later to tell a colleague who had asked for advice as to how to handle the Queen, 'First of all, remember she is a woman.' He never forgot this himself. She responded by sending him a valentine card depicting cherubs lying on clouds.

'The present Man will do well,' she told the Crown Princess with complacent satisfaction, 'and will be particularly loyal and anxious to please me in every way.⁶ He is vy peculiar ... most singular - thoroughly Jewish looking, a livid complexion, dark eyes and eyebrows and black ringlets. The expression is disagreeable, but I did not find him so to talk to. He has a very bland manner, and his language is very flowery ... but he is vy clever and sensible and vy conciliatory, He is full of poetry, romance & chivalry. When he knelt down to kiss my hand wh[ich] he took in both his - he said: "In loving loyalty and faith." '⁷

It would, he assured Her Majesty, 'be his delight and duty to render the transaction of affairs as easy as possible'. In 'smaller matters', he hoped he would succeed in this endeavour; but he ventured to trust that, in the great affairs of state, Her Majesty would deign not to hold from him the benefit of her wise guidance. 'Your Majesty's life has been passed in constant communion with great men,' he continued in the same tone of complimentary blandishment, 'and the knowledge and management of important transactions. Even if Your Majesty were not gifted with those great abilities, which all must now acknowledge, this rare and choice experience must give Your Majesty an advantage in judgement, which few living persons, and probably no living prince, can rival.'[xlv]⁸ Disraeli himself recognized that he did lay it on 'rather thick' with her. When he received a box of primroses from Windsor, for example, he told her that 'their lustre was enhanced by the condescending hand which [had] showered upon him all the treasures of Spring'. As he said to Matthew Arnold, 'you have heard me called a flatterer, and it is true. Everyone likes flattery; and when you come to royalty, you should lay it on with a trowel.'⁹ But he never underestimated the Queen's astuteness; he grew genuinely fond of her; in treating her with elaborate courtesy and deferential flirtatiousness he was behaving towards her as he did towards all women he liked. In writing those long, amusing, informative, gossipy letters which meant so much to her, he was indulging a whim to please her rather than performing a necessary and arduous duty.

Disraeli's letters certainly delighted her. She told Lady Augusta Stanley that she 'had never had such letters in her life', that she 'never before knew everything'.¹⁰ 'No Minister,' she wrote, 'since Sir R. Peel (excepting poor dear Lord Aberdeen) has ever shown that care for my personal affairs, or that respect and deference for me which he has.'

There were, of course, things she was not told; but Disraeli was always anxious to ensure that she was given the impression of constantly being consulted except on trivial matters not worth her consideration. On suggesting, for example, that the Duke of Atholl might be appointed a Knight of the Order of the Thistle, he wrote, 'Your Majesty is a much better judge of these matters than himself; and indeed there are very few public matters on wh[ich] he feels more and more every day Your Majesty is not much more competent to advise than be advised.'¹¹ 'I never deny,' he once said, explaining his method of dealing with her. 'I never contradict, I sometimes forget. '¹²

Attentive towards her in his fulsome correspondence, Disraeli was as careful to charm her whenever they met. He did not much like going to Windsor, that 'castle of the winds' as he called it, remembering with a shudder the icy draughts that blew under doors and through ill-fitting window frames; but he never showed his discomfort to her. He resented having to go to Balmoral, being forced to travel so many miles from London to a place where it rained almost continuously throughout his first visit and where he caught a cold on his second: he never paid a third. But he displayed no irritation. He 'seemed delighted with his visit,' the Queen wrote of the first occasion, '& made himself most agreeable'.¹³ On a subsequent visit to Osborne it was the Queen who made herself most agreeable to him.

Osborne was lovely [Disraeli told his friend, Lady Bradford], its green shades refreshing after the fervent glare of the voyage, and its blue bay full of white sails.

The Faery [Disraeli's less mocking than affectionate nickname for the Queen] sent for me the instant I arrived. I can only describe my reception by telling you that I really thought she was going to embrace me. She was wreathed with smiles, and, as she tattled, glided about the room like a bird. She ... said, 'To think of your having the gout! How you must have suffered! And you ought not to stand now! You shall have a chair!'

Only think of that! I remember that Lord Derby after one of his severest illnesses, had an Audience of her Majesty, and he mentioned it to me, as a proof of the Queen's favour, that Her Majesty had remarked to him, 'how sorry she was she could not ask him to be seated'.14

Disraeli was Prime Minister, however, for less than a year. In December 1868 she was obliged to part with him and to accept a Liberal Government under the leadership of the 59-year-old William Ewart Gladstone.

When she had first met Mr Gladstone, whose character Prince Albert had held in high regard, she had esteemed him too. 'He is very agreeable,' she had written at that time, 'so quiet & intellectual, with such a knowledge of all subjects, & is such a good man.' But since then she had changed her mind about him, comparing his 'cold loyalty' to the throne with the 'warm devotion' of Disraeli and agreeing with the Hon. Emily Eden that Gladstone did not converse, he harangued: 'and the more he says,' Miss Eden added, 'the more I don't understand ... if he were soaked in boiling water and rinsed until he was twisted into rope, I do not suppose a drop of fun would ooze out. '¹⁵

He spoke to the Queen at great length with what Henry Ponsonby described as that 'terrible earnestness', which he brought to the most trivial activities, even to the rattling of dice, giving the impression that, while he revered the monarchy, he did not set great store by the intelligence of its present representative who, he considered, had to have everything explained to her in the most exhaustive and exhausting detail. Yet, when the Queen made some comment, so she complained, he would merely say, 'Is that so? Really?' 'He does not care what you say. It makes no difference.'

The Queen grudgingly recognized Gladstone's talents, granted that he had a fine, commanding presence and a sonorous voice; yet she could not bring herself either to like or to respect him. Lacking Disraeli's ingratiating tact and sensitivity, he addressed her, as she said herself, as though she were a public meeting rather than a woman and was quite incapable of following the advice of his wife who sensibly said to him, 'Do pet the Queen, and for once believe you can, you dear old thing.' Similar advice was given to him by Dean Wellesley who had been at Eton with him: 'Everything depends upon your manner of approaching the Queen ... You cannot show too much regard, gentleness, I might say, even tenderness towards her.' But it was not in Gladstone's nature to 'pet' her; nor could he bring himself to flatter her. On the contrary, he gave her the impression that he did not think her worthy of such attentions. 'The Queen,' she once told her Private Secretary, 'must complain bitterly of the want of respect and consideration of her views which ... ought to be regarded on the part of the Government ... She feels hurt and indignant. '¹⁶ She often felt humiliated as well as exasperated by Gladstone's clever, tedious, high-minded discourses and took refuge in the conclusion that he was a humbug. She would have concurred both with Mary Ponsonby, who complained that, marvel of erudition though Mr Gladstone might be, he could 'never understand a man, still less a woman', and with Henry Labouchere who said that he did not object to Gladstone's always having the ace of trumps up his sleeve, but only to his pretence that God had put it there. Mr Gladstone, the Queen eventually decided, was 'a mischievous firebrand', 'arrogant, tyrannical and obstinate'.

One of Gladstone's principal preoccupations on coming into office was how best to deal with what he termed the 'Royalty question', how to persuade the Queen to appear more often in public, a problem which gave him what he called 'the blue devils'.

Chapter 42 JOHN BROWN

The feelings running high against the Queen - despite her occasional public appearances in the late 1860s - and what was perceived as her selfishness and greed as well as her wilful refusal to perform more public duties, were fanned by certain newspapers and magazines which brought up other more scurrilous charges against her: she was showing exceptional partiality to one of her Highland servants. This 'great Court favourite', as John O' Groats Journal referred to him, was said to be far more than an indulged servant: he was the Queen's lover; she was 'in an interesting condition'; they were secretly married; he was her medium in spiritualist seances; he was her keeper, for she had gone mad. Curiosity about the man consumed society. One day in March 1867 A. J. Munby saw 'a long line of carriages near the Achilles statue in the Park waiting to see the Queen go by to Windsor ... And then the Queen drove by, with outriders & hussars, her younger children with her, looking plump & matronly and pale, in widow's weeds; and that John Brown, of whom there is so much foolish talk, sat behind, a big man in livery. '¹

Most of the members of the Royal Household, although reputedly referring to Brown as 'the Queen's stallion', were convinced, as Henry Ponsonby told his brother, that while 'certainly a favourite', the man was 'only a Servant and nothing more'; and what Ponsonby supposed had begun as a joke had been 'converted into a libel'.² Randall Davidson, who saw much of her in his capacity as Dean of Windsor and her domestic chaplain, said that 'one had only to know the Queen to realize how innocent' her relationship with the man was.³ Yet he was such an extraordinarily indulged favourite that it was not surprising that caricatures depicted him standing proprietorially in front of an empty throne, that defamatory pamphlets referred to the Queen as Mrs Brown, or that parodies of the Court Circular appeared in the press:

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 a bag-pipe. Mr John Brown retired early.4

She is really doing all in her power to create suspicions which I am persuaded have no foundation [Lord Stanley commented on the Queen's relationship with Brown]. Long solitary rides, in secluded parts of the park; constant attendance upon her in her room: private messages sent by him to persons of rank: avoidance of observation while he is leading her pony or driving her little carriage: everything shows that she has selected this man for a kind of friendship that is unwise and unbecoming in her position. The Princesses - perhaps wisely - make a joke of the matter, and talk of him 'as mama's lover'.[xlvi]5

John Brown was a blunt, strong, good-looking and excessively self-assured man with thick curly hair and a beard that did not fully conceal a determined, emphatic chin. One of nine sons bought up on a small farm, he had started life as a stableboy at Balmoral and had later been employed by the Queen and the Prince Consort as a ghillie. Seven years older than Prince Albert and the Queen, he had treated them both without a trace of either subservience or disrespect. The Prince had liked him and had picked him out from the other ghillies as the one to be trusted with the special duty of watching over the Queen's safety and seeing to her comfort. He had performed his duties to her entire satisfaction, combining, as she put it herself, 'the offices of groom, footman, page and maid, I might almost say, as he is so handy about cloaks and shawls'.⁶ Indeed, before her husband's death she had already come to regard him as indispensable. When Sir Howard Elphin-stone proposed one day that Brown should accompany Prince Arthur on some expedition she quickly put a stop to that idea: 'Impossible. Why, what should I do without him? He is my particular ghillie.'⁷

Since her husband's death the Queen had come to rely on Brown more and more whenever she was at Balmoral and she had taken him and her pony-chaise with her on her visit to Germany in 1862. A link with her precious past, he had further recommended himself to the Queen by his presence of mind in two carriage accidents. He was so dependable, so faithful, so comforting and so much at ease in her presence. He was also most generous, often contributing considerably more towards the cost of wedding presents to the Balmoral staff or to funds for servants in distress than the gentlemen of the Household. He was also habitually outspoken and not infrequently drunk. The Queen, however, seemed to take pleasure in his rough, masculine assertiveness - he was so unlike Arthur Stanley, the Dean of Westminster, who appeared to her to be 'of no sex' - and she affected not to notice Brown's inebriation or, when it was obvious, attributed it to 'bashfulness'. 'Hoots, then, wumman,' Brown had been heard to snap at her when he pricked her chin while fixing the strap of her bonnet, 'Can ye no hold yerr head up.' Or, if he did not approve of her dress, he would comment derisively, 'What's this ye've got on today, wumman?' When she made some complaint about her sketching table he told her to stop complaining, silencing her with the words, 'I canna mak one for ye.' Once a maid-of-honour, seeing him with a picnic hamper, asked him if it was tea he was taking out. 'Well, no,' he told her. 'She don't much like tea. We tak oot biscuits and spirits.' As the months passed Brown became increasingly indulged, increasingly assertive and - with the other servants who were jealous of him and the courtiers who were exasperated by him - increasingly disliked. He was 'all powerful', so Lord Carlingford was led to believe. 'No servant had a chance of promotion except through him, and he favoured no man who didn't like his glass ... Some of the courtiers were full of attention to J. B., gave him presents, etc. - and he despised them for it. He was, however, unwearied and devoted in his attention to the Queen.'⁸ And since he was so, and since Her Majesty was so dependent upon him and refused to go out driving with any other servant, Dr Jenner and Sir Charles Phipps, with her immediate agreement, decided towards the end of 1864 to have Brown brought down from Balmoral to Osborne for her health's sake. At least he would get her out into the open air when no one else could.

By the beginning of 1865 Brown had been promoted to the office of 'The Queen's Highland Servant', with duties both indoors and out; and by the end of 1872, his salary having been raised to the most generous sum of £400 a year, the Queen was referring to him, in notes addressed to John Brown, Esq., as her 'friend' and 'most confidential attendant', who had not had 'a single day's holiday or been absent for a day or a night' from his post. 'He comes to my room - after breakfast & luncheon to get his orders,' the Queen told the Crown Princess, '& everything is always right - he has such an excellent head & memory ... is besides so devoted, & attached & clever ... It is an excellent arrangement, & I feel I have here always in the house, a good, devoted soul... whose only object & interest is my service, & God knows how much I want to be taken care of ... And in this house where there are so many people, & often so much indiscretion & no Male head now - such a person is invaluable.⁹ 'He is devoted to me,' she told King Leopold. 'It is a real comfort.'¹⁰

With most of the members of her Household, though, irritation with Brown and his domineering ways turned to detestation. He did not like being kept up late by smokers, so the smoking room had to be closed by midnight. Neither her sons nor her sons-in-law were permitted to smoke in her presence, but Brown puffed away on the solid cakes of tobacco he stuffed into his pipe. He did not like being sent for 'at all hours for trifling messages', so the equerries were told that 'he must not be made "a man of all work" - besides, it loses his position'.¹¹

He quarrelled with the Queen's chaplain; he quarrelled with her German librarian; he quarrelled with the factor at Balmoral; he quarrelled with Ministers, once causing astonishment by stopping Gladstone in mid discourse with the injunction, 'Ye've said enough'.¹² He quarrelled with Prince Alfred, the Duke of Edinburgh, and when he was at last prevailed upon to apologize and was told that His Royal Highness seemed satisfied, he declared loftily, 'I am satisfied, too. '¹³ He quarrelled with the Queen's Assistant Private Secretary, Arthur Bigge, who was disturbed in his room at Balmoral one day by Brown who came in 'with a stern countenance' to say, 'You'll no be going fishing. Her Majesty thinks it's about time ye did some work. '¹⁴

While not actually quarrelling with the Queen's daughters, he was resented by them not least because, in Princess Alice's words, 'he alone talks to her on all things, while we, her children, are restricted to speak on only things which do not excite her, or of which she chooses to talk.'

There were those who believed that the Queen was sometimes rather frightened of Brown, particularly when he was drunk.[xlvii] Once he was discovered by Henry Ponsonby lying inebriated on his bed when the Queen was waiting in her carriage for him to take her on her afternoon drive. Ponsonby locked Brown in his room, went downstairs, 'mounted the box and drove off. 'The Queen knew what it was and knew that he knew. But on this, as on other occasions, she turned a blind eye.'¹⁵

In 1867 Brown's attendance upon the Queen, who had been most reluctantly persuaded to be present at a review in Hyde Park, was insisted on by Her Majesty as a condition of her own appearance. When the Ministers protested against the man's being with her upon so important a public occasion - which was fortunately cancelled in the end for other reasons - the Queen declared angrily that she would 'not be dictated to' nor 'made to alter' what she had found answered 'for her comfort'. It was absurd to suggest, she told one of her equerries, that her carriage might have been attacked had she appeared in the Park with 'poor, good Brown'. The feeling against him was fostered by 'ill-natured gossip in the highest classes, caused by dissatisfaction at not forcing the Queen out of her seclusion'.

So Brown's influence continued, and visitors to Balmoral and Osborne were astonished at its extent. At Osborne, a royal son-in-law, on going out to shoot one morning, found that Brown had been there before him and there were no birds left in the coverts. At Balmoral, so a member of the Royal Household related, 'he sends up to find out how the fish are. If he hears a bad report he does not go out and the Queen then offers the [fishing] to [one of her doctors].' His brusqueness was legendary. 'When the Mayor of Portsmouth came to ask the Queen to go to a Volunteer review, the Private Secretary sent in the request to her and hoped to get the reply privately so that he might convey it civilly to the Mayor,' Ponsonby recorded. 'As they both sat in the Equerries' room waiting, Brown put his head in and only said, "The Queen says saretenly not." '¹⁶ He was equally blunt when informing members of the Household which of them were to dine with the Queen, on occasions putting his head round the door, glancing from one face to the next, then announcing, 'All what's here dines with the Queen.'

Brown's behaviour during the ghillies' balls was particularly objectionable. 'What a coarse animal that Brown is,' the Lord Chancellor once complained. 'Oh yes, I know the ball could not go on without him. But I did not conceive it possible that anyone could behave so roughly as he does to the Queen. '¹⁷ Lord Ribblesdale, a lord-in-waiting, described one of these rowdy balls which the Queen attended, 'following the revolutions of the dancers with a benevolent but critical eye':

We had what seemed to be incessant reels, Highland schottisches, and a complicated sustained measure called the 'Flowers of Edinburgh'. Even with proficiency this dance requires constant attention, if not actual presence of mind, to be in the right place at the right moment - anyhow, more than I possessed in the mazy labyrinth. I was suddenly impelled almost into the Queen's lap with a push in the back and 'Where are you coming to?' It was Mr John Brown exercising his office as Master of Ceremonies. After a good many Caledonians, Mr Brown came to ask the Queen, 'Now, what's your Majesty for?' Mindful of her English subjects the Queen suggested a country dance. This did not find favour. 'A country dance,' he repeated, turning angrily on his heels.18

Henry Ponsonby, who had joined the household as the Prince Consort's equerry in 1856, found these ghillies' balls as tiresome as did Lord Ribblesdale. He did not enjoy the company of the ghillies at the best of times. He found deer stalking extremely boring and, when compelled against his will to take part in the sport, he stuffed his pockets with newspapers and the Fortnightly Review so as to render the long waits less wearisome. At the end of the day there was sometimes a gruesome torch-lit dance round the slaughtered animals during which the ghillies absorbed torrents of whisky and sang songs. Further quantities of whisky were drunk around the huge granite cairn which had been erected to the memory of Prince Albert and which still bears the legend: 'Albert the Great and Good, raised by his broken-hearted widow.'

Still more whisky was drunk at the ghillies' balls from which Ponsonby stole away whenever he could with the excuse that he had important work to do. But his absence was always noticed and remarked upon with 'some asperity'. Should he return, he was obliged, as a punishment, to dance a particularly rowdy sort of reel which was one of John Brown's favourites.¹⁹

The Queen attended these balls regularly and appeared to enjoy them to the full, even insisting that they were not cancelled when the Court was officially in mourning: on the death of the Grand Duke of Hesse she declined to postpone the forthcoming ball for more than three days, giving as an improbable excuse that she did not 'regard it as gaiety'.²⁰

Exasperating as the gentlemen of the Household found John Brown's behaviour, they could not but agree that the man, 'exceedingly troublesome', though he was, had his uses.

'I believe he was honest,' wrote Henry Ponsonby after Brown's death, 'and with all his want of education, his roughness, his prejudices and other faults he was undoubtedly a most excellent servant to her ... He was the only person who could fight and make the Queen do what she did not wish.'²¹

He reminded her of 'former happy days', and knew well how to comfort her in the present with his rough and simple sympathy and loyalty. It meant so much to her, she said, to have 'one faithful friend' near her whose 'whole object' she was and who could 'feel so deeply for her' and 'understand [her] suffering'.

Just as he felt perfectly at ease with her, so she did with him, quite without that shyness which so often overcame her in the presence of others. She also felt protected. When she was working in her tent in the garden he would march about outside to make sure she was not disturbed; and when out in her carriage he would drive off anyone who came too close. 'I wish to take care of my dear, good mistress till I die,' he once said to her by her own account. 'You'll never have an honester servant.' She then 'took and held his dear kind hand' and said that she hoped he might long be spared to comfort her.

Concerned that her pleasure in the company of John Brown was helping her to overcome the worst of her continuing grief at the loss of her husband, the Queen consulted the 'tender hearted' Gerald Wellesley. Wellesley reassured her: God sometimes placed sympathetic people in the path of those who mourned to comfort them; it was only right that the bereaved should turn to them for consolation.²²

Improbable as they were, the rumours of the Queen's supposedly passionate love affair with her ghillie continued to circulate, while she did nothing to conceal her reliance upon him and her affection for him. Regularly she sent him greetings cards at Christmas and New Year inscribed 'to my best friend J. B. from his best friend V. R.', 'to my kind friend from his true & devoted one', 'from a devoted grateful friend'.²³ And at least one of her communications to him was addressed to her 'darling'. Edwin Landseer's painting, Queen Victoria at Osborne, showing her reading a letter as she sits side-saddle on a black horse whose rein is held by John Brown, was exhibited at the Royal Academy in the 1860s and sold engraved copies in large numbers. One of these engravings - in which at her insistence Brown's beard was shortened - she gave to Sir Howard Elphinstone with a note: 'It is beautifully engraved and the likeness of herself (rather a portly elderly lady) [in fact portrayed as a rather attractive 46-year-old one] and her good faithful attendant and friend are both, she thinks, very good.'²⁴

Soon after this picture was shown at the Royal Academy, there appeared the Queen's Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands in which John Brown figured prominently. In a long footnote devoted to Brown in this book, he is described as having 'all the independence and elevated feelings peculiar to the Highland race, and is singularly straightforward, simple-minded, kind-hearted and disinterested; always ready to oblige; and of a discretion rarely to be met with'. 'His attention, care and faithfulness cannot be exceeded,' the Queen added, 'and the state of my health, which of late years has been sorely tried and weakened, renders such qualifications most valuable and indeed most needful.'²⁵

John Brown is shown leading ponies up mountain tracks, rowing boats across lochs, speaking in praise of Prince Albert's patience, sitting on the box of the sociable, causing amusement by calling the Queen 'Your Majesty' when she was travelling incognito as Lady Churchill, being 'too bashful' to wait at table when the royal party were on one of their expeditions from Balmoral, being 'very merry' in the commercial rooms of the hotels where they stayed the night.

The Queen's Leaves from the Journal of our Life in the Highlands first appeared in a privately printed edition; and there were many who thought that it should have remained in that edition if it were to be printed at all. Lady Augusta Stanley, for example, considered that it would 'do great harm to our dear One'. It was all very well for Arthur Helps - the Clerk of the Privy Council, who edited the book and wrote a preface to it - to claim that there was no one who wished 'more ardently than her Majesty that there should be no abrupt severance of class, but rather a gradual blending together of all classes'.²⁶ Lady Augusta deplored the footnotes devoted to mere servants as though 'on the same footing' as gentlemen.²⁷ Others regretted that the book gave the impression that the Queen's life was one long holiday. Yet others criticized the naivety of the writing, its ingenuousness, its occasional banalities and unintentional humour. Yet its very simplicity, the 'homeliness' which the author herself feared might prevent it being taken seriously, the atmosphere of happy enjoyment which pervades it, all contributed to its great success. When it was published by Smith, Elder & Co., one hundred thousand copies were sold within three months: it was estimated that the author eventually received more than £30,000 in royalties; and, while it was much parodied in such publications as John Brown's Legs or Leaves from a Journal in the Lowlands, it was not altogether undeserving of the high-flown praise which Disraeli cast upon it as possessing 'a freshness and fragrance like the heather amidst which it was written'. It gave him the opportunity to delight the Queen with his celebrated flattery - 'We authors, Ma'am!'

So the Queen dismissed the objections of her critics. 'From all and every side,' she said, '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.' 'It is very gratifying,' she wrote to the Crown Princess who, like most of the family, disapproved of the publication, 'to see how people appreciate what is simple and right and how especially my truest friends - the people - feel it. They have (as a body) the truest feelings for family life.' 'You have also never said one word about my poor little book,' the disgruntled Queen complained, 'my only book. I had hoped that you and Fritz would have liked it.'²⁸

'I know,' she told the Prince of Wales, 'that the publication of my book did me more good than anything else.'²⁹

Chapter 43 'THE ROYALTY QUESTION'

Despite the occasional cheers that greeted the Queen when she did appear in public, both her Household and the Government grew increasingly concerned by the resentment occasioned by the infrequency of those occasions on which she agreed to emerge from her purdah.

In the summer of 1869 General Grey decided that the time had come to make a forceful effort to persuade the Queen to appear in public more often. He was not convinced that she was as ill as William Jenner said she was when there was some unwelcome duty to perform. She must be reminded by the Prime Minister in a peremptory manner of her duty. She was, with difficulty, persuaded by Gladstone to leave Osborne a few days before she had intended to do so in order to be in London to deal with important matters of state, though she insisted that this must on no account be considered a precedent. Also - performing both ceremonies on the same day that year - she opened Holborn Viaduct and Blackfriars Bridge; but these occasions were not a success: as she drove down the Strand her carriage was hissed.

A few months later, in February 1870, she flatly refused to open Parliament. It was an unfortunate beginning to a most troublesome year. That same month the Prince of Wales was required to appear in court to give evidence in an unsavoury divorce case involving a pretty, unbalanced woman, Harriet Mordaunt, who had confessed to her husband that she had committed adultery 'often and in open day' with several men, including His Royal Highness. The Prince strongly protested his innocence; but he could not deny that he had written Lady Mordaunt several, fortunately quite innocuous, letters. Sir Charles Mordaunt's petition was dismissed on the grounds that since his wife was insane, and was by then consigned to a lunatic asylum, she could not be a party to the suit.

The Queen was convinced of her son's innocence of the charge of adultery, but she did not hesitate to condemn his 'intimate acquaintance with a young married women' which could not fail 'to damage him in the eyes of the middle and lower classes'. She also strongly condemned the society in which he led his fast life, the 'frivolous, selfish and pleasure-seeking' rich. As Sir Charles Dilke observed, the Queen's Court was 'singularly dowdy by the side of the Prince of Wales's'. 'But on the other hand', Dilke added, 'though her servants are shabby, the people about the Queen are more uniformly gentlemen and ladies than those about the Prince. '¹

The Prince, booed at Ascot races and at the theatre, attacked in pamphlets and ridiculed in magazines, countered the Queen's criticisms of his conduct by tentatively admonishing her for hers. 'If you sometimes came to London from Windsor,' he wrote to her, 'and then drove for an hour in the Park (where there is no noise) the people would be overjoyed ... We live in radical times, and the more People see the Sovereign the better it is for the People and the Country.'² This was precisely the view of the Royal Household; and, in particular, of Henry Ponsonby.

Henry Ponsonby, who had been appointed one of the Queen's equerries after the Prince Consort's death, had often helped General Grey with his work, and, as a reticent, intelligent man with a fluent pen and a bold clear hand, he had for some time been recognized as his most likely successor. Ponsonby's appointment was not made, however, without considerable opposition from the Queen's family who objected to what they supposed to be his 'extreme radical tendencies'. General Grey had been a Liberal and had once sat in the House of Commons in the Liberal interest for High Wycombe. But Ponsonby's views were supposed to be far more extreme than those of Grey, while his wife's political opinions were notorious. Mary Ponsonby was condemned as being 'clever', a dreadful failing - she actually wrote articles for the Pall Mall Gazette - and she had, as even her devoted husband had to admit, 'peculiar views on everything'. Consequently both the Duke of Cambridge, the Queen's cousin, and her son-in-law, Prince Christian, were rigidly opposed to Ponsonby's appointment. But the Queen, as Ponsonby wrote, 'disregarded the remonstrances and was pleased to appoint me, sending me at the same time a hint through the Dean of Windsor that I was to be cautious in expressing my opinions and not to permit my wife to compromise me in her conversation' - a hint which, when conveyed to Mary Ponsonby, elicited the response that she herself had no intention of being compromised 'by being supposed to agree for an instant with the opinions of Court Officials'.

Although Ponsonby's untidy clothes and far too long trousers were a disgrace, and although the Queen had occasion to rebuke him more than once for causing too much rowdy laughter in the Equerries' Room, she liked him from the beginning and recognized in him the kind of qualities which were to make him an exceptional private secretary. He had the ability to get to the root of a problem without wasting time with irrelevancies; he had a good knowledge of the world and of men; he was understanding, patient and industrious. While witty and possessed of a fine sense of the ridiculous, he was also capable of listening carefully to what was said to him by even the most tedious and stupid people without revealing a trace of irritation or boredom. He could express himself well in conversation and also in writing; and he had a lively sense of humour. He did not consider himself a gifted linguist, but he could converse and write letters in French, had a working knowledge of Italian and, though correspondence in German had to be left to the German secretary, he was usually capable, as he used to claim with some pride, of starting a German visitor off in his own language and then receiving 'the resultant prolonged monologue with sufficiently appropriate interjections' to put him at his ease.

Most important of all, Ponsonby understood as well as anyone the Queen's contradictory character. She did not, he said, 'belong to any conceivable category of monarchs or of women. She bore no resemblance to an aristocratic English lady, she bore no resemblance to a wealthy middle-class Englishwoman, nor to any typical Princess of a German court. She was not in the least like the three queens regnant her predecessors ... Moreover she reigned longer than the three other queens put together. Never in her life could she be confused with anyone else, nor will she be in history. Such expressions as "people like Queen Victoria" or "that sort of woman" could not be used about her.'³ It was Henry Ponsonby's understanding of the Queen's character that made him so useful a private secretary. Like General Grey he knew just how far he could go on any particular occasion in persuading her to act against her own wishes, and he refused to jeopardize his influence over her by pressing her too hard when he well knew such pressure would merely result in her refusing to discuss the subject again. 'When she insists that 2 and 2 make 5,' he wrote, 'I say that I cannot help thinking they make 4. She replies there may be some truth in what I say, but she knows they make 5. Thereupon I drop the discussion. It is of no consequence and I leave it there.' He contrasted this method with that of a colleague who pursued such controversies, bringing in proofs, arguments and, worst of all, former sayings of her own. 'No one likes this,' Ponsonby added. 'No one can stand admitting they are wrong, women especially; and the Queen can't abide it. Consequently she won't give in.'

Ponsonby's way of dealing with the Queen, in contrast to that of the unnamed colleague, frequently did result in her giving in, or, more often, quietly allowing a matter to drop rather than admitting that she had been wrong.

One trivial, if time-consuming, incident well illustrates Ponsonby's way of dealing with a mistress to whom, he said, advice had always to be given 'in a most gingerly way'. It concerned the arrangements for a holiday abroad, every trifling detail of which had to be submitted for the Queen's approval. Taking the register of servants who were to accompany her she struck all but one off the list of housemaids, maintaining that one housemaid would be quite enough. The staff objected and, as usual, asked Ponsonby to intervene. He did so, and thus recorded the result:

Of course quite right that only one housemaid should go. I would send to her [another] girl from the Hotel. But stray girls were not always very honest. So I hoped the Queen would not leave things about to tempt her. I got the answer that another housemaid should go from here.4

Towards the end of her life, when Ponsonby had become rather forgetful and his handwriting, so she complained, had become difficult to read, she began to find his circuitous way of approaching problems rather irritating. 'He has no backbone,' she complained to her doctor, James Reid, 'is always placid and easily talked over by anybody. He has no courage, but agrees with me, and then is talked over by others and agrees with them. He agrees with everybody.'⁵

As General Grey had done, Ponsonby tackled Sir William Jenner about the Queen's refusal to perform her royal duties in the way Ministers required.

Jenner said he had charge of her health and would do his duty [Ponsonby recorded in a memorandum] ... He would not advise her to do things against her health for a political object. If Ministers did not believe him [when he maintained she was ill] there was nothing he could do about it ... 'But,' I said, 'you could ask her to try - perhaps it would not do her harm. Besides which, it is not for the good of the Government but the existence of the Queen.' No, he would not hear of that.

'People ask how can she attend Gillies' Balls at Balmoral [which she did, staying up until one o'clock in the morning] and not stand a little of London balls?' Ponsonby protested.

'He said (which is very true) that at Gillies' Balls she speaks to none but at London Balls she would be expected to speak to many.'

'But why shouldn't she live more in town and drive about there?'

'Because it makes her head ache.'

'Well, if she is ill how can it be good for her to travel so far to Balmoral?'

'Of course, it is. When people are ill they are often ordered off to a distance at once.'

So, while Jenner stood firm, maintaining that 'his care was her health and not her actions', Ponsonby could do nothing. Nor could her children. Jenner 'positively refused the Crown Princess, Princess Louise and Prince Arthur's entreaties, saying he could be of no use.' Nor could Ministers persuade her to do what she did not want to do. She told the Lord Chancellor that 'she had seen from long experience that the more she yielded to pressure and alarm ... it only encourages further demands and that she is then teased into doing what is bad for her health.'⁶

When she was asked to open Parliament in January 1866 she wrote the Prime Minister a letter of extravagant but not atypical protest:

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 ... 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! ... She owns she resents the unfeelingness of those who have clamoured for it. Of the suffering which it will cause her - nervous as she now is - she can give no idea, but she owns she hardly knows how she will go through it.7

'It is impossible to deny that H. M. is drawing too heavily on the credit of her former popularity,' Lord Halifax, the Lord Privy Seal, wrote to Ponsonby, 'and that Crowned Heads as well as other people must do much that was not necessary in former days to meet the altered circumstances and altered tone of modern times ... The mass of the people expect a King or a Queen to look and play the part. They want to see a Crown and Sceptre and all that sort of thing. They want the gilding for the money. It is not wise to let them think ... that they could do without a sovereign who lives at Osborne and Balmoral as any private lady might do.'⁸

Referring to 'the Royalty question', Gladstone lamented that 'a 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.' One of the Queen's own equerries observed to Gladstone, 'There is only one great capital in Europe where the Sovereign is unrepresented and that capital is London.'⁹ Joseph Chamberlain, the Radical politician and future Cabinet Minister, expressed the view in 1871 that 'The republic must come, and at the rate at which we are moving, it will come in our generation.'¹⁰ Charles Bradlaugh, proprietor of the republican weekly periodical, the National Reformer, expressed the view that 'the experience of the last nine years [since 1861] proves that the country can do quite well without a monarch and may therefore save the extra expense of monarchy. '¹¹

The Queen's seclusion was a recurring topic in almost every newspaper. 'The living have their claims as well as the dead,' a characteristic article in The Times averred. 'Every honour that affection and gratitude could pay to the memory of the Prince Consort has been offered [and the time had now come] for the Queen to think of her subjects' claims and the duties of her high station, and not postpone them longer to the indulgence of an unavailing grief.'

The general public agreed. Lady Amberley, Lord John Russell's daughter-in-law, noted in her journal, 'Everyone is abusing the Queen very much for not being in London or Windsor ... No respect or loyalty seems left in the way people allow themselves to talk of the Queen, saying things like, "What do we pay her for if she will not work?" and "She had better abdicate if she is incompetent to do her duty." '¹²

Occasional support came to the Queen both from expected and unexpected quarters. John Bright, the Radical orator and Member of Parliament for Birmingham, in a speech at St James's Hall on 4 December 1866, had declared that he was 'not accustomed to stand up in defence of those who are the possessors of crowns. But I think there has been, by many persons, a great injustice done to the Queen in reference to her desolate widowed position'; and he 'ventured 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 for you.'¹³

The Queen was so touched by this declaration in her favour by Bright, the death of whose first wife had left him 'in the depths of grief, almost of despair', that, when Bright agreed to become President of the Board of Trade in Gladstone's cabinet, the Queen proposed that, as an old man and a Quaker, he should not be required to kneel and kiss hands at the formal ceremony of acceptance of office. Bright accordingly did not kneel but, wearing knee breeches especially made for the occasion, he did kiss the Queen's hand, something Quakers 'in general never do'.[xlviii]¹⁴

But Bright's views were shared by few others. Most of his fellow-politicians, of both left and right, agreed with The Times and those other newspapers which voiced the same opinions.

Chapter 44 'THE PRINCELY PAUPER'

The repercussions of the Mordaunt divorce case had scarcely died away when in the summer of that year of 1870 war broke out between France and Prussia. At first France was seen in England as the aggressor; but, later, the Queen was once more in trouble for her widely reported sympathy for the Germans which flew in the face of the sympathies of her people who became, as she put it, 'very French'. At a meeting of republicans in October, after Napoleon Ill's army had been beaten at Sedan, a French border fortress on the Meuse, and France had been declared a republic, the Queen's Court was described, not for the first time, as constituting a mere 'pack of Germans'. Even so, when the defeated French Emperor arrived in England in March 1871 the Queen greeted him warmly:

I went to the door with Louise and embraced the Emperor 'comme de rigueur'. It was a moving moment, when I thought of the last time he came here in '55, in perfect triumph, dearest Albert bringing him from Dover, the whole country mad to receive him, and now! He seemed much depressed and had tears in his eyes, but he controlled himself and said, 'Il y a bien longtemps que je n'ai vu votre Majeste.' He led me upstairs and we went into the Audience Room. He is grown very stout and grey and his moustaches are no longer curled or waxed as formerly, but otherwise there was the same pleasing, gentle, and gracious manner. My children came in with us. The Emperor at once spoke of the dreadful and disgraceful state of France.1

The month before the Emperor's arrival the Queen had consented to open Parliament and she agreed to wear a new crown; but it was said that once again she was stirring herself only because she wanted more money: Prince Arthur, soon to be created Duke of Connaught, was twenty-one that year and in need of an annuity, while, on 21 March, Princess Louise was to marry the Marquess of Lome, son of the Duke of Argyll, and had to have a dowry.

Yet, having opened Parliament in February, the Queen was most reluctant to delay her departure for Balmoral to prorogue it in August, in spite of a plea from Gladstone and hints from her eldest daughter who composed a letter which was signed by all the Queen's children and children-in-law but which, in the event, was never delivered to her. 'No one has prompted us to write,' this letter ran. '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.'²

The Queen had not prorogued Parliament in person since 1852, she protested. 'What killed her beloved Husband?' she asked in a letter to the Lord Chancellor, Lord Hatherley. 'Overwork & worry - what killed Lord Clarendon [Gladstone's Foreign Secretary who had died suddenly the year before]? The same ... & the Queen, a woman, no longer young [she was now fifty-two] is supposed to be proof against all and to be driven and abused till her nerves and health will give way with hurry and agitation ... She must solemnly repeat that unless her Ministers support her ... she cannot go on & must give her heavy burden up to younger hands. Perhaps then those discontented people may regret that they broke her down when she might still have been of use.'³

Four days after this letter was written the Queen developed a sore throat. She was, she said, feeling 'extremely unwell'. The Household had so often been told that she was poorly when an unwelcome duty was to be performed that few believed her. But when she left for Balmoral on 17 August she really did look ill; and at Balmoral for the whole of the rest of the month and the beginning of the next she filled her diary with accounts of a very painful arm, sleepiness during the day, a 'choking sensation with violent spasms', rheumatic pains and gout. She had never felt so ill 'since typhoid at Ramsgate in 35'. She 'reluctantly agreed' that Joseph Lister, at that time Professor of Clinical Surgery at Edinburgh, should be sent for. On 4 September Lister lanced an abscess in her arm, an operation which, she confessed, made her 'dreadfully nervous' because, so she said, contradicting an earlier assertion, she bore 'pain so badly'. That night she could 'hardly turn over' in her bed, while the next day she could not walk because her gouty foot was so painful. John Brown was required to carry her to bed because she was too heavy for the maids to lift - Lord Stanley had recently described her as 'very large, ruddy and fat'. On 18 October she recorded in her journal:

A most dreadful night of agonizing pain. No sedative did any good ... Had my feet and hands bandaged. My utter helplessness is a bitter trial, not even being able to feed myself ... Dictated my Journal to Beatrice, which I have done most days lately ... Was unable all day hardly able to eat anything.4

By the time she was on the way to recovery towards the end of the month she had lost two stone.⁵

Meanwhile, attacks upon the invisibility of the grasping miser, the 'princely pauper', continued apace. A copy of an anonymous pamphlet, attributed to the historian G. O. Trevelyan, Liberal Member for the Border Burghs, entitled What does she do with it?, reached Balmoral. In it the author condemned the Queen's parsimony and hoarding of money and calculated that she was squirrelling away no less than £200,000 a year. On 6 November, another Member of Parliament, Sir Charles Dilke, delivered a loudly cheered speech in which he declared that the cost of the Royal Family to the nation had risen to £1,000,000 a year - ten times, so another speaker claimed, the income of the President of the United States - and Dilke suggested that this enormous expense was 'chiefly not waste but mischief. Even the middle classes, he said, would welcome a republic if it were to be 'free of the political corruption that [hung] about the monarchy'. When, referring to the extravagant number of officials at Court, which still included a salaried Lord High Falconer and a Lithogra-pher-in-Ordinary, Dilke said that one of them was a Court undertaker, a man in the crowded audience called out that it was a pity there was not more work for him to do.[xlix]⁶

A fortnight after Dilke's speech was delivered, on 21 November 1871, a telegram arrived at Balmoral from the Prince of Wales's country house at Sandringham in Norfolk which led the household to fear that this man's wishes might soon be fulfilled. The Prince, at the age of thirty, was dangerously ill with typhoid fever contracted during a visit to Lord Londesborough's house near Scarborough where the noisome drains were soon to be responsible for the deaths of the Earl of Chesterfield as well as the Prince's groom.

Chapter 45 TYPHOID FEVER

The Queen - while still declining to allow her heir to play any part in the business of government on the grounds that he was both irresponsible and indiscreet - had at last come to view the Prince of Wales in a less disagreeable light, even though it continued to rile her that her eldest son was now so much more popular in the country at large than her far worthier husband had ever been. He was really 'so full of good and amiable qualities'. She could not help wishing that he was not always 'gadding about' all over the country and on the Continent; but, when he was at home, she was sure 'no heir apparent ever was so nice & unpretending as dear Bertie'. 'I am always glad & happy to have him a little with me,' she wrote, '& I only wish I could see him oftener.'¹ The news of his serious illness shocked her deeply; and on 29 November 1871 she hurried to Sandringham to be with him.

Princess Alice was already there, a severe trial to her sister-in-law, the Princess of Wales, who found her bossy and unsympathetic. Prince Alfred was also there. His brother, Prince Leopold, was soon to come. So was the Duke of Cambridge. When the Prince of Wales's two youngest sisters, Princess Louise and Princess Beatrice, arrived as well, they were obliged to sleep in the same bed, so crowded had the house become with courtiers, servants, visiting Ministers and anxious members of the patient's family. And what 'an extraordinary family' they were, thought Princess Alexandra's Lady of the Bedchamber, Lady Macclesfield. She found it 'quite impossible to keep a house quiet as long as it is swarming with people and really the way in which they all squabble and wrangle and abuse each other destroys one's peace'. The one exception, Lady Macclesfield decided, apart from the Princess of Wales, was the Queen who remained 'charming, so tender and quiet',² though not so quiet as to refrain from objecting to her son's habit of keeping all the clocks at Sandringham half an hour fast because of the Princess of Wales's chronic unpunctuality. 'She had them all put back. She thought it a ridiculous habit and a "lie" - so characteristic of her!'³

Calm as she contrived to be at Sandringham, however, the Queen could not disguise her apprehension. 'Somehow,' she wrote in her journal on 6 December, 'I always look for bad news & have not much confidence.' Her son had rallied a little soon after her arrival and she had felt able to leave Sandringham for a time; but grave reports had brought her hurrying back and by the 7th he was reported to be 'as bad as ever or worse'. Lady Macclesfield reported to her husband: 'The doctors say that if he does not rally within the next hour a very few more must see the end.'⁴ That night Prince Leopold was called to his brother's dressing room and on his way there passed numerous relations and servants and members of the Household, all in their night clothes. 'It was,' he wrote, 'too dreadful to see the poor Queen sitting in the bedroom behind a screen listening to his ravings. I can't tell you what a deep impression it made on me.'⁵

The doctors' subsequent bulletins, five of which were issued during the course of a single day, inspired a poet - generally thought, though probably mistakenly, to be Alfred Austin, later to be appointed Poet Laureate - to write those lines that were to confer upon him an immortality which all Austin's later writings would certainly have denied him:

Across the wires the electric message came:

'He is no better; he is much the same.'

On 12 December the Queen, who was in fearful dread that the Prince would die on the anniversary two days later of his father's death, went to bed 'with the horrid feeling' that she would 'be called up'. The next day the end seemed imminent: her son's temperature had risen to 104⁰. 'In those heart-rending moments,' she wrote, 'I hardly knew how to pray aright, only asking God if possible to spare my Beloved Child.'⁶

She did not often leave the house, though all the windows were kept tightly closed against the snow and there was such a fusty smell in the crowded rooms that the Duke of Cambridge became convinced that they were all in danger of catching typhoid fever, too. He rushed about the house, sniffing in corners, and jumping up with a startled cry of, 'By George, I won't sit here!' when the Prince of Wales's Private Secretary said that he also had noticed a bad smell in the library. For days the Duke remained 'wild on the subject', insisting on examining all the drains of the house until a man came from the gas company and discovered a leaking pipe.⁷

Fearful as he was of catching typhoid fever, the Duke seemed quite as much alarmed by the Queen. So apparently were the rest of the family. One day Henry Ponsonby was walking in the garden with Prince Alfred's equerry when they 'were suddenly nearly carried away by a stampede of royalties, headed by the Duke of Cambridge and brought up by Leopold, going as fast as they could'. Ponsonby thought that a mad bull must be on the rampage. But the stampeding royalties 'cried out: "The Queen! The Queen!" and [everyone] dashed into the house again and waited behind the door until the road was clear.'[l]⁸

The Queen herself continued to endeavour to keep calm and controlled, but distress at her son's plight and concern for her daughter-in-law sometimes proved too much for her. One day she burst into tears and cried out, 'There can be no hope!' Indeed, for days on end there seemed little reason to expect that the Prince could recover as he lay tossing and sweating in his bed, frequently in delirium, making all kinds of wild remarks, revealing guilty secrets of his past.

But then the crisis passed. On 14 December he was, as his mother said, brought back from the 'very verge of the grave'. The next day, when she went into his room, he smiled, kissed her hand, and said, 'Oh! dear Mama, I am so glad to see you. Have you been here all this time?'⁹

Two months later the Prince, 'quite himself again', went to recuperate at Osborne. He was 'gentler and kinder than ever', the Queen contentedly told his eldest sister. 'And there is something different which I can't exactly express. It is like a new life - all the trees and flowers give him pleasure, as they never used to do, and he was quite pathetic over his small wheelbarrow and little tools at the Swiss Cottage. He is constantly with Alix, and they seem hardly ever apart.'¹⁰

The Queen was naturally much against the sort of public thanksgiving which Gladstone suggested would be appropriate to the occasion. But the Government, sensing the mood of the people, insisted that a procession through London followed by a service in St Paul's Cathedral would satisfy a universal demand for some such celebration. Princess Alexandra agreed with them. So the Queen gave way; and having done so, she saw to it that 'the show', as she sardonically termed it, was carried out properly. There would be an open carriage; there would be banners and flags in the streets; the bells would ring in the church towers and steeples. Of course, John Brown would be sitting on the box of her carriage 'in his vy handsome full dress'.

The subsequent celebration, so Gladstone gratefully declared, was perhaps the most satisfactory that London had ever witnessed. It was a quite 'extraordinary manifestation of loyalty and affection'. The royal carriage, an open landau drawn by six horses, was greeted by deafening cheers all along the route. The Queen, her black dress trimmed with miniver and a white feather in her bonnet, obligingly entering into the spirit of the occasion, waved and nodded to the crowds and, raising her son's hand up in her own, kissed it with fond tenderness.¹¹ 'People,' she said, 'cried.' It was 'a day of triumph ... Everywhere troops lined the streets, and there were fifteen military bands stationed at intervals along the whole route, who played "God save the Queen" and "God bless the Prince of Wales", as the carriage approached which evoked fresh outbursts of cheering. I saw the tears in Bertie's eyes ... It was a most affecting day. '¹²

The enthusiasm was nearly universal. The feelings of the country towards the monarchy had changed almost overnight. Republicanism as a significant force in British politics, already damaged by the excess of the Paris Commune, had suffered a blow from which it was never to recover. As the Prince of Wales's friend Lord Carrington said, the monarchy was now safe. When Charles Dilke again brought up the question of the Queen's expenditure in the House of Commons, he was shouted down.¹³

Despite her cheerful demeanour on that day of thanksgiving, however, the Queen was still not yet ready to show herself in public or to grant audiences to her Ministers more often than was strictly necessary. When in the summer of 1872 Edward Cardwell, the Secretary for War, enraged her by paying a tribute to the troops in his own name rather than in hers, Henry Ponsonby was brave enough to suggest that she must be prepared to accept that such things were bound to happen so long as her Ministers saw her so rarely.

Nor was the Queen yet prepared to allow - even after twelve years of widowhood - any more of those splendid entertainments that had formerly been given to such royal visitors as Tsar Nicholas I, the King of Saxony, King Louis-Philippe, Napoleon HI and King Victor Emmanuel II. Before the Prince Consort's death, in 1841 alone, no fewer than 113,000 people had been entertained to dinner at Windsor. But after 1861 the Queen had persistently declined to have strange foreign royalties to stay at Windsor. She was, she said, 'UTTERLY incapable of entertaining any Royal personage as she would wish to do, except those who are very nearly related to her, and for whom she need not alter her mode of life.'¹⁴

To welcome the Sultan of Turkey, who had come to England in 1867, she had permitted some appropriate celebrations and had allowed her band to play for 'the first time these 6 sad years'. But she had done so reluctantly; she had declined to come down from Balmoral a single day early - even though warned that English influence, which was then paramount at Constantinople, might well be damaged if the Sultan were shown less respect than he had been in Berlin and Paris - and she was very glad when it was time to say goodbye to her 'oriental brother' whose visit was concluded by a naval review in a turbulent sea at Spithead during which he had to go repeatedly below deck to be sick.¹⁵

The Queen of Hawaii, a 'peculiarly civilized ... savage', who later arrived on an official visit, was asked to come to Windsor at three o'clock in the afternoon so that the Queen, who gave her no more than a few minutes of her time, would not have to ask her to luncheon.

She had been equally unwelcoming towards the King of Sweden, who had had to stay at the Swedish Legation, Prince Humbert of Italy, who was told there was no room at Windsor Castle and had been put up at the White Hart in the town, and Khedive Ismail of Egypt who was grudgingly granted a night's hospitality at Windsor (provided his entourage was small) with a strong protest 'against the pretension raised that she should at her own expense, in the only Palace of her own ... entertain all Foreign Potentates WHO choose to come here for their own amusement'.¹⁶

In 1873 the Queen was with great difficulty persuaded to welcome the Shah of Persia for reasons which Gladstone assured her were of the utmost political importance. She was very irritable and fidgety before his visit, so Henry Ponsonby recorded, insisting that the Government must contribute to the cost of the entertainment of the Shah's entourage, asking crossly why he was termed 'Imperial'. 'Because he is the Shah-in-Shah,' Ponsonby replied. 'Well, that's no reason!' she snapped and had the title removed from the programme.¹⁷ Then she twice changed her mind about the date of a military review to be held in the Shah's honour in the Park.

The Queen, Ponsonby had to admit, had some reason for her agitation. Reports had reached London of the Shah's 'uncivilized notions and habits', his custom of 'wiping his wet hands on the coat-tails of the gentleman next to him without compunction', of sacrificing a cock to the rising sun, of his clumsiness with knife and fork and his habit of drinking out of the spout of a teapot. It was rumoured that he intended to leave three of his wives behind but that several other ladies would be included in his suite to console him in their absence, that he generally dined alone and preferred to have his meals, which usually included roasted lambs cooked on tripods, served on a carpet. 'For this purpose,' the Household were warned, 'a movable carpet [which, after he had gone, was found to be severely burned] should be kept ready whereupon his servants will put the dishes etc. brought to the door by the English servants ... The Shah does not like to have his meats cut up. Rice, lamb, mutton, fowls are favourite dishes. The cuisine should be somewhat relevee.' It must be expected, the British Ambassador in Berlin added, that the Shah might throw his arm round the Queen's chair at formal dinners, 'put his fingers into dishes, or take food out of his mouth to look at it after it has been chewed, or fling it under the table if it does not suit his taste'.¹⁸ He might also make improper suggestions to the Queen's ladies; and might well be rude to them: when Baroness Burdett-Coutts was presented to him he looked in her face and, summing up two of the few words of French he knew, exclaimed, 'Quelle horreur!'¹⁹

As it happened, however, the Shah turned out to be not as outre as the Queen had expected. He was 'fairly tall and not fat', with a 'fine countenance and very animated', dignified and pleasant. At first she felt 'very shy' with him as they sat next to each other in full state in the middle of the White Drawing Room, surrounded by English and Persian Princes and Princesses; but since he was not in the least shy with her, she soon overcame her embarrassment. He showed no inclination to eat strangely in her presence, contenting himself mostly with fruit and iced water handed to him by his cup-bearer. He was covered with jewels, with immense rubies serving as buttons in his diamond-studded coat, with epaulettes of emeralds, and an aigrette of diamonds in his astrakhan hat. But she, too, wore splendid jewels, the largest of her pearls and the Koh-i-Noor diamond; so she did not feel overshadowed. On the advice of the Prince of Wales she invested him with the Order of the Garter, although he was a Moslem; and, having kissed her hand, he presented her with two orders in return while the Grand Vizier helped to save her headdress from falling off. She also gave him a miniature of herself set in diamonds which, so she heard with profound satisfaction, he had kissed publicly 'with reverence' before his departure from Windsor railway station. Most gratifying of all, at luncheon in the Oak Room, as bagpipers marched up and down, he had told her that he had had her Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands specially translated into Persian.²⁰

Chapter 46 MAIDS-OF-HONOUR

Such excitements as were afforded by the visits of the Sultan and the Shah to Windsor were still very rare. Yet by the time of the Shah's visit in 1873 the Queen had at last outgrown the worst of her grief. She was seen to smile more often, and to laugh. She began once more to record in her diary incidents that had amused her; her letters became more cheerful; she brought herself to play nostalgic tunes on her piano, and she began to dance again - she was still dancing ('like a pot', a German prince whose English was not strong enough for the compliment informed her) at Windsor when she was seventy - she told funny stories about herself and was fond of relating how one clear and starlit night she had opened her bedroom window to look out into the dark sky and a sentry at the foot of the Castle wall, thinking she must be a housemaid, 'began to address her in most affectionate and endearing terms. The Queen at once drew her curtains but was simply delighted at what had happened. '¹ She was still capable of exercising an undoubted charm which Randall Davidson described as 'irresistible'.²

There was no relaxation, though, in the propriety that the memory of Albert's strict moral sense had emphasized. The Queen, as her husband had required of her, demanded impeccable discretion in conduct as well as in conversation. To satisfy her sense of decorum people whose birth or duties brought them into her presence must not merely be innocent, they must never have appeared to be guilty. They must also conform to those rules of conduct she had established for her household. Gentlemen, for instance, must wear black frock coats in her presence, even at Balmoral; maids-of-honour must never receive any man, even their brothers, in their own rooms; they must entertain them as best they could in the waiting room downstairs; and they must always be ladylike in their demeanour and conversation: one of them who was indelicate enough to complain of rheumatism in her legs was coldly informed by the Queen that, in her own youth, ladies 'did not have legs'. Another was considered to be wearing too much make-up. 'Dear General Grey' will tell her so, the Queen commanded. But the General himself bravely objected when Her Majesty's message was conveyed to him. 'Dear General Grey,' he said, 'will do nothing of the kind.'

Much was required of the eight maids-of-honour besides propriety of behaviour. Paid £300 a year, they were divided into pairs and expected to be on duty a month at a time for three months of the year. When she was appointed, Marie Adeane had to answer the following questions:

1. Could I speak, read and write French and German?

2. Play the piano and read easily at sight in order to play duets with Princess Beatrice?

3. Ride?

4. Was I engaged or likely to be engaged to be married?'³

It was also understood that maids-of-honour would additionally be competent at needlework and sketching and be familiar with the rules of card games. They would be expected to converse amiably and intelligently to their neighbours at dinner, to be agreeable companions to the Queen when required to accompany her in her morning or afternoon rides, and, at all times, to be models of discretion. They must not keep diaries.⁴

It was also taken for granted that neither the maids-of-honour nor any other member of the Household would get married without the risk of incurring the Queen's strong disapproval. When James Reid, who was appointed her Resident Medical Attendant in 1881 and knighted in 1895, had the audacity to become engaged to one of her maids-of-honour, Susan Baring, Lord Revelstoke's daughter, the Queen was 'dumbfounded'. For weeks she refused to allow the engagement to be announced, while Reid complained to his fiancee that it was 'ridiculous to have to submit to be treated like children'.⁵

I must tell you of a marriage wh. annoys me vy. much, [the Queen wrote to her eldest daughter] Sir J. Reid !!! and my M. of H. Susan Baring. It is incredible. How she cld. accept him I cannot understand! If I had been younger I wld. have let him go rather - but at my age it wld. be hazardous & disagreeable so he remains!! ... It is too tiresome and I can't conceal my annoyance. I have never said a word to her yet. It is a gt. mesalliance for her but he has money of his own.6

To another of her maids-of-honour, Elizabeth Bulteel, the Queen remarked, 'I was more than astonished, I was rather angry. I did not expect my Maids-of-Honour to be snapped up before my very nose.'⁷

It was five weeks before the Queen could bring herself to offer Reid her good wishes and then she felt compelled to add that she thought their future position would present 'many difficulties'. She trusted that they would 'both do their utmost to lessen as much as possible the unavoidable inconvenience to the Queen' and that Reid would 'still faithfully devote himself to his duties as in the past', in accordance with a set of regulations which she had already submitted to him.⁸

It was said at the time that the Queen forgave Reid only when he amused her by apologizing for getting married and promising never to do it again.

Annoyed as she had been with Sir James Reid, she was equally so when Marie Adeane asked Princess Beatrice to tell the Queen that she 'hoped to be married' to Bernard Mallet, A. J. Balfour's Private Secretary. 'This raised such a storm,' Marie Adeane wrote after receiving a cross letter from the Queen accusing her of inconstancy and informing her: 'You will easily understand that this has disappointed me very much.' The Queen 'told Lady Churchill that she was terribly vexed'; and weeks later the matter was 'still a sore point'. Eventually, however, all was forgiven, and when Miss Adeane went to say goodbye the Queen was so kind that the young girl burst into tears. 'I really do love the Queen so much,' she told her mother, 'and it pains me to vex her.'⁹

Demanding as she was - thinking nothing of taking the maids-of-honour out driving on the bitterest of days and, not feeling the cold herself, oblivious to her companions' shivering - the older the Queen grew the more securely she commanded the affection as well as the respect of her ladies, for, inconsiderate as she so often was, she was also capable of great kindness and understanding sympathy. In the same contradictory way, she was alternately almost painfully honest and capable of the most devious machinations, prudish and tolerant, hard-headed and sentimental, artless and acute, combining sound common sense with outlandish prejudices, real and pretended.

While frequently expressing her wish to fight alongside her brave soldiers and her pleasure when women succeeded in what were supposed to be male preserves, she was firmly opposed to their entering the professions, particularly the medical profession - the prospect of young girls and men entering the dissecting room together was an 'awful idea'.¹⁰ The campaign for women's suffrage was a 'mad wicked folly': Lady Amberley who supported it 'ought to get a good whipping'.¹¹ Education 'ruined the health of the higher classes uselessly' and rendered the 'working classes unfitted for good servants and labourers'.¹²

She was 'Coburgized from head to foot' and took 'the part of foolish foreign royalties with extraordinary zeal'. Yet, if on many occasions she was absurdly prejudiced and unreasonable, she was essentially, as Henry Ponsonby recognized, a woman of good sense. She was obstinate but rarely obtuse. When far cleverer people were wrong, she was often instinctively right. As Lord Salisbury observed, she had a deeper understanding of the passing moods of her people than many politicians who spent far more time among them than she did.¹³ Both Lord Salisbury, her last Prime Minister, and Henry Ponsonby recognized that in dealing with her one had not only to take advantage of her mercurial moods, as well as what she felt to be the state of her health, but also to try to understand her complex and contradictory character.

Chapter 47 SECRETARIES AND MINISTERS

Among the many rules which the Household were required to observe was an edict that there must be no smoking in any room which the Queen might enter, or, indeed, in the grounds of any of her residences, though she herself had been seen at a summer picnic lighting a cigarette and 'puffing very delicately' to keep midges away.¹

Nor were her secretaries allowed to smoke when handling papers she might have to touch. Before she was persuaded - apparently by John Brown - that a little tobacco smoke was 'no bad thing to have about the hoose', cards were framed and hung upon the walls of the royal residences calling attention to the prohibition against smoking; and visitors to Windsor waited until the Queen went to bed and they could go along to the billiard room, the only place in the Castle where smoking was tolerated.² But the atmosphere in the billiard room was scarcely more relaxed than it was in the drawing room, particularly when the Queen's second son Prince Alfred was there, since the Duke was a most loquacious and boring talker. 'The Duke of Edinburgh occupies the chair and talks about himself by the hour,' Henry Ponsonby told his wife. 'Those who go [to the billiard room] are quite exhausted. Prince Henry [of Battenberg] has given up smoking in consequence.'³

Once Count Hatzfeldt, who could not make the effort for the long journey to the billiard room, yet 'could not live without a cigar', was reduced to lying on his bedroom floor and blowing the smoke up the chimney.⁴ The King of Saxony was less discreet and profoundly shocked the Court by having the audacity to walk up the grand staircase with a cigar in his mouth.⁵ Courtiers who smoked secretly took to carrying peppermints in their pockets, for there was no telling when a summons to the Queen might come; and even to be in church was no excuse for being late in answering it.⁶

Much as her ladies grew fond of her, she undoubtedly became an increasingly difficult, capricious and demanding employer as the years passed, frequently cross when, having sought advice, the counsel offered did not coincide with her own wishes. Disliking interviews in which her opinions, requests or orders might be called into question, she required that all matters, even those of a most trivial nature, should be committed to paper. Her private secretaries accordingly had an enormous amount of paperwork to get through every day, some of it of the utmost importance to the successful conduct of the Government's affairs, much else of no importance at all, each particular point for her consideration having to be submitted on a separate sheet.

There were requests for her to accept books, to grant permission to copy pictures, to approve the details of Court functions, to confirm appointments and dismissals, to give her assent to Government policy, to select the names of clergymen suitable as preachers at Osborne, to decree the punishment to be inflicted upon a drunken footman at Windsor. There was one exchange of memoranda, which lasted for weeks, about the installation of a lift at Buckingham Palace; there was another, which continued for even longer, about the rights and duties of the Queen's band. The Queen's replies to Henry Ponsonby's submissions came back either in the form of terse minutes at the foot of the document concerned or in letters, written hurriedly and sometimes indecipherably. One of the Queen's letters, in which she complained of the 'atrocious & disgraceful writing' of a young nobleman in the Colonial Office, took Ponsonby a quarter of an hour to get through. But at least, when they had at length been deciphered, her decisions were concise and definite. For example, Sir Frederick Leighton, President of the Royal Academy, asked permission to have a copy taken of a portrait of the Queen by Sir Martin Archer Shee. The Queen's refusal ran: 'It is a monstrous thing no more like me than anything in the world.' Another artist asked leave to engrave one of the pictures he had painted for her: 'Certainly not. They are not good and he is very pushing.' A lady wrote to ask if her daughter might be granted permission to gain material for an article on the Royal Mews: 'This is a dreadful and dangerous woman. She better take the facts from the other papers.' Oscar Wilde sought leave 'to copy some of the poetry written by the Queen when younger': 'Really what will people not say & invent. Never cd. the Queen in her whole life write one line of poetry serious or comic or make a Rhyme even. This is therefore all invention & a myth.'[li] Would the Queen graciously assent to the new medical school at Edinburgh being named after her? 'Yes, on one condition viz: that no rooms for vivisection are included in it.'[lii]

So, day after day, the ebb and flow of paper ceaselessly continued: Canon Dalton must not repeat grace in Latin. It was a mistake to say the chaplain at Hampton Court had given satisfaction; he never did so and was 'most interfering and disagreeable'. Neither the Dean of Westminster nor the Dean of Christ Church was to be allowed to preach at Osborne; the sermons of the first were far too long and those of the second like lectures. With infinite care and patience Ponsonby transmitted the Queen's instructions, tactfully altering the wording so as to give the least offence, writing all the letters himself, for up till 1878 he had no assistant.⁷

Reading and answering letters occupied a large part of the Queen's secretaries' time abroad as well as at home, though many of those received on the Continent - such as one offering for sale a red, white and blue cat, and another addressed to 'Madam and dear Mother', asking her 'to give a little thought' to the son whom she had 'abandoned in India' -were not deemed worthy of reply.⁸

The paperwork, burdensome as it was, constituted the least tiresome of Ponsonby's duties. He was constantly importuned by seekers after honours and titles, many of whose shameless petitions he did not trouble to pass on to the Queen. He was also constantly being called upon to take up the grievances and pass on the complaints of the numerous minor royalties who 'hovered at a distance round the Court', as well as to settle quarrels and to pacify the ruffled feelings of those within the Household who had been affronted either by their colleagues or rivals, or, as was often the case, by the Queen's lack of consideration. One such complainant was the Marchioness of Ely, a lady of the bedchamber, a timid, nervous and perpetually flustered widow suffering from some form of speech defect which compelled her to convey messages from the Queen in a kind of 'mysterious whispering' which Ponsonby did not always 'strain his ears to hear'. Her complaints - made to Sir Thomas Biddulph, Master of the Household, who passed them on to Ponsonby - were that the demands of the Queen were 'killing her' and that Her Majesty had refused permission for Lady Ely's son to go to see her. She was, however, reluctant to make a fuss. 'Perhaps,' she said, 'the Queen would not like it.' 'It shows,' Biddulph reported to Ponsonby, 'her absurd fear of the Queen.'⁹

Ponsonby's services were required not only as a mediator between the Queen and her family and intimidated ladies but also in the settlement of disputes occasioned either by the huffiness of the German Secretary, Hermann Sahl - who was frequently so put out by some real or imagined slight that he refused to come down to meals - or by the squabbles of the Household doctors, often provoked by Sir William Jenner, a Tory of the most extreme kind, much given to outbursts of wild invective against Gladstone's Government which may well have been approved by the Queen but which seemed outrageous to Ponsonby. 'He is good at repartee and roars at his success,' Ponsonby told his wife after one particularly rowdy dinner at Osborne. 'He roundly abused Carlingford [Gladstone's Lord Privy Seal] and Lord Cairns [the former Lord Chancellor who was very deaf] because they could not understand him. I refuted an argument of his which he said he did not use. "Why," I exclaimed, "you said so just now." His eyes disappeared and in a calm voice he said, "I strongly advise you to consult an aurist, the first aurist in London, there is something extraordinarily wrong about your ears."'¹⁰

Ponsonby was fond of Jenner, however, despite his loud cantanker-ousness and reactionary views. He also liked James Reid who, on his first arrival at Court, was informed that he could not, as an ordinary doctor, dine with the gentlemen of the Household as this would be a breach of the Queen's instructions for the social acceptance of members of his profession. Not at all put out by this, Reid began to give dinners of his own to which many members of the Household preferred to go rather than to endure the dullness and constraints of their own dining room.¹¹

It was to men like Reid that Ponsonby turned for relief from the appalling dullness of court life. This dullness was never more oppressive than it was at Balmoral, to which the Queen remained devoted because of its association with her happy married days and which her Ministers abhorred, not only because they wasted so much of their time travelling there when they were required to attend upon the Queen, but also because they were so uncomfortable when they did get there.

Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, who was there one winter as minister-in-attendance when the snow was thick on the ground, reported to his wife:

It is the funniest life conceivable: like a convent. We meet at meals, breakfast 9.45, lunch 2, dinner 9: and when we have finished each is off to his cell ... In this weather, I spend the whole day reading alone in my room ... The Castle ... carpeted & curtained in tartan ... is all intersected by long, narrow passages, ending in baize doors and I could not find my way ... It has been a perfectly dreadful day. Snowing ever since 10 a.m.... I drove to church at Crathie ... My companions envied me my nice fur coat...

The amusing thing is the way [the Household] lament the dullness. Certainly the actual dinner is triste enough, every one half whispering to their neighbour ... They are all so sick of each other they jump at a stranger.12

There were compensations, though: he 'got on very well' with both Princess Louise and Princess Beatrice. It was 'really a different thing' when Princess Louise was of the company; while Sir Henry Ponsonby was 'a perfect brick - so natural & unaffected through it all: he makes it endurable'. He was a fund of amusing stories. He told Campbell-Bannerman one of Mrs Gladstone writing a letter: 'Dear Lord Borthwick, will you let my son fish in your waters at Invercauld?' and receiving the reply, 'Dear Mrs Gladstone, I am not a Lord, I do not live at Invercauld, & I have no fish.'

The Queen, so Campbell-Bannerman heard, was 'always either very serious or all smiles'. When summoned to dine at her table one evening, he himself was 'quite fatigued' by 'a long & very animated conversation with her' while a band - 'quite charming', 'so beautiful', in her opinion - played in the corridor outside. At a subsequent dinner, 'rather a more degage party altogether than usual', the Queen was 'very merry over some old Aunts of hers who when she was a girl used old-fashioned pronunciations - obleege, goold for gold, ooman for woman, ospital for hospital etc. etc.'[liii]¹³

Life at Balmoral would not have been so tedious for members of the Household had they been allowed more freedom. But everything to do with the running of their lives was under the Queen's own strict control. She decided the precise time of their arrival and departure; she directed that they must never leave the house until she herself had gone out; when they did go out they must use only those particular ponies which, divided into five categories, were allocated to their use. Maids-of-honour must not talk to the gentlemen unless accompanied by a chaperone; on Sundays everyone had to go to church.

Demanding and difficult as she could be there were few members of her Household who were not eventually captivated by her capricious charm, the delightful smile which transformed the severity of the grumpy expression caught in the photographs of her that she so liked to have taken. The Dean of Windsor, Randall Davidson, attempted to define this charm:

I think it was the combination of absolute truthfulness and simplicity with the instinctive recognition and quiet assertion of her position of Queen ... I have known many prominent people but with hardly one of them was it found by all and sundry so easy to speak freely and frankly ... I have sometimes wondered whether the same combination of qualities would have been effective in a person of stately or splendid appearance. May it have been that the very lack of those physical advantages, when combined with her undeniable dignity of word and movement, produced what was in itself a sort of charm? People were taken by surprise by the sheer force of her personality. It may seem strange, but it is true that as a woman she was both shy and humble ... But as Queen she was neither shy nor humble, and asserted her position unhesitatingly.14

Chapter 48 REGINA ET IMPERATRIX

On 24 May 1874 Queen Victoria celebrated her fifty-fifth birthday. Three months previously she had been delighted when, in the general election of that year, the Conservatives were returned to power with their first clear majority over the Liberals since 1841 and Mr Gladstone, protesting that he 'deeply desired' what he called 'an interval between Parliament and the grave', decided to retire.

Released from the oppressive presence of the 'old hypocrite' and basking once more in the affectionate flattery of Disraeli, the Queen began to take a far more enthusiastic interest in public affairs than she had ever done before in her life and allowed herself to be persuaded by cajoling encouragement, sometimes with the support of John Brown, to do things no one else could have induced her to do. 'Disraeli has got the length of her foot exactly,' commented Henry Ponsonby. 'He seems to me always to speak in a burlesque ... with his tongue in his cheek ... He communicates ... boundless professions of love and loyalty. He is most clever ... In fact, I think him cleverer than Gladstone. '¹

The Queen was well aware of the wiles and coaxing blandishments which Disraeli used in his attempt to impose his will upon her. 'He had a way when we differed,' she told Lord Rosebery wistfully after Disraeli's death, 'of saying, "Dear Madam" so persuasively', as he put his head on one side, his ringlets, dyed a deep black, falling over his temples.²

Persuasive as he was, however, he could not always get his way with her; and on occasions she contrived to get her own way with him. She did so, for example, with the Public Worship Regulation Bill which Disraeli would have liked to dispense with but which the Queen insisted was a necessary corrective to the extreme ritualists who were introducing papist practices into the Church of England. She also had her way over the Royal Titles Act which gave the Queen the right to style herself Empress of India at a politically inconvenient time. She had long wanted this imperial title which so many sovereigns like the King of Prussia had acquired and which enabled those who held it - as it enabled the Emperor of Russia whose designs in the Far East were notorious - to arrogate to themselves and their children dignities and precedence which she felt demeaning to herself and her own. 'I am an Empress,' she had announced one day in 1873 when she was certainly not, '& in common conversation am sometimes called Empress of India.' Why then, she wanted to know, had she never 'officially assumed this title?' She felt she ought to do so and desired to have 'preliminary enquiries made'.³

Disraeli, though he had no objection to the idea itself, did object to the introduction of the Bill at a time when the Liberal press would be able to make the most of the widespread opposition to it. But he did not want to disappoint 'the Faery'; and so he instructed the Lord Chancellor to put the announcement into the Queen's speech just after the paragraph referring to a forthcoming visit which the Prince of Wales was to make to India. 'What might have been looked upon as an ebullition of individual vanity' would then 'bear the semblance of deep and organised policy'.

The struggle to get the Bill passed was long and tiring; and Disraeli, who was suffering from gout, asthma and bronchitis, was seriously affected by the strain. But on 12 May 1876 the Queen was declared an empress and thereafter could sign herself with pride Regina et Imperatrix.⁴

Delighted with her new title, the Queen was reported to be 'in ecstasies', too, when Disraeli - borrowing £4,000,000 from Baron Rothschild while Parliament was in recess - bought the bankrupt Khedive of Egypt's shares in the Suez Canal on behalf of Her Majesty's Government. 'It is just settled,' Disraeli wrote to her triumphantly. 'You have it, Madam.'⁵ Accepting it with gratitude, the Queen considered the purchase yet another example of her Prime Minister's 'very lofty views' of her country's proper place in the world, besides being 'a blow against Bismarck'. She was confirmed in this opinion of him when troubles in the still huge though crumbling and ramshackle Turkish Empire showed how much 'greater' he was than Gladstone.

Never much concerned with the plight of oppressed nations and racial minorities struggling for freedom, Disraeli was disinclined to pay close attention to reports of the mistreatment of Christian subjects by their Turkish masters; and was concerned only lest the other great powers might profit from interference. When reports reached London that thousands of Bulgarian peasants had been murdered by Turkish irregular troops he affected to suppose that the stories of the massacre were mere 'coffeehouse babble', referring to the 'atrocities' in inverted commas as though they were the figment of some inventive journalist's imagination. The Queen was rightly inclined at first to take the stories more seriously. 'She don't like the Turks,' Henry Ponsonby said, 'hates them more because of their atrocities.' But then Gladstone, equally outraged by the stories and sensing that the time had come to emerge from his premature retirement, helped to alter her view by giving voice to the horrified outrage of the British people in his famous pamphlet The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East, which, castigating the Turks as 'the one great anti-human specimen of humanity', sold 200,000 copies within a month and brought large crowds of demonstrators to rallies all over London. Well aware that Gladstone's passionate protest was far more in tune with the nation's feelings than his own dismissive cynicism, Disraeli hotly denounced the pamphlet as 'contemptible', 'vindictive and ill-written', the product of an 'unprincipled maniac, perhaps the greatest ... of all the Bulgarian horrors'. The Queen was quite as condemnatory. Gladstone, that 'half-madman', was 'a mischief-maker and firebrand', whose conduct was 'shameful and most reprehensible'. The Turks, whose cruelty had previously been inexcusable, were now seen to have been reacting against the Russians, the Slavs' traditional protectors. And in her fury against the Russians on whose shoulders rested 'the blood of the murdered Bulgarians', and whose policies were seen as directed towards mastery in the East, the Queen became positively bellicose.⁶ To demonstrate her support of her Prime Minister's 'Imperial policy' as against Gladstone's 'sentimental eccentricity', she not only opened Parliament in February 1877 but also went to a well-publicized luncheon with Disraeli at Hughenden Manor, his country house in Buckinghamshire, a visit which prompted a vehement supporter of Gladstone insultingly to jeer at 'the Jew in his drunken insolence' having had the Queen to eat with him 'ostentatiously ... in his ghetto'.⁷

As passions rose and quarrels grew ever more bitter in one of the fiercest political arguments that has ever erupted in England, Disraeli became increasingly anti-Russian. But while declaring that England's military resources were inexhaustible, and that once she entered into a war she would not stop fighting till right was done, he merely wished to threaten war rather than wage it, in the hope that peace might be preserved without loss of honour. The Queen, on the other hand, was less restrained. In music halls her people raucously sang the chorus to a popular song which added a new word to the English language, and she could not but sympathize with their sentiments:

We don't want to fight, but, BY JINGO if we do,

We've got the ships, we've got the men, we've got the money too.

We've fought the bear before, and while we're Britons true

The Russians shall not have Constantinople.

The Queen shared such emotions to the full. 'Oh, if the Queen were a man,' she told Disraeli, 'she would like to go & give those horrid Russians, whose word one cannot trust, such a beating.' To the Crown Princess, who was not so furious in her dislike of them as her mother, she wrote impatiently, 'I am sure you would not wish Great Britain to eat humble pie to those deceitful cruel Russians?'⁸ Of those who suggested that Britain ought to be conciliatory towards the Russians, those 'horrible, wicked ... villainous, atrocious' Russians, she was dismissively scornful.⁹ As for Lord Derby, the Foreign Minister, who was attempting to prevent a conflict by revealing Cabinet secrets to the Russian ambassador, 'words failed her'. Not trusting him to make her feelings plainly known to the Tsar, she wrote directly to St Petersburg without reference to him; and when Ponsonby expressed his concern at her indulging in so unconstitutional a practice she was quite unrepentant. It was a 'miserable thing to be a constitutional Queen,' she complained, '& to be unable to do what is right'.¹⁰

She threatened to 'lay down her crown' rather than 'submit to Russian insult'; and she admitted that she 'never spoke with such vehemence' as she did to the Colonial Secretary, Lord Carnarvon, who was far too pacific for her taste and had warned against a repetition of the Crimean War. 'Inspired by the British Lion', she 'pitched into him with vehemence and indignation,' she reported to the Crown Princess, '& he remained shrinking but still craven hearted! - wishing to say to the world we cld not act!!! Oh! that Englishmen were now what they were!! But we shall yet assert our rights - our position - & "Britons never will be slaves" - will yet be our Motto.'¹¹

Nor did the Queen altogether spare from her strictures the Prime Minister who, pursuing a delicately balanced policy, was at one moment condemned by the Opposition for being too aggressive and at another berated at a banquet by a lady who angrily demanded to know what he was waiting for - to which question he replied with his customary suavity, 'At this moment for peas and potatoes, Madam. '¹²

When Russia imposed upon Turkey the secret conditions of the Treaty of San Stefano of March 1878 which was believed to require Turkey to pay an immense indemnity and to surrender several Aegean ports, thus providing the Russians with bases in the eastern Mediterranean, the Queen demanded forceful action. Lending her authority to the hawks in the Government and strongly advocating 'a bold and united front to the enemy', she reviewed troops, went to Spithead to inspect a naval task-force, and sent numerous telegrams to the Prime Minister as well as memoranda for him to read to his colleagues.

Faced with the prospect of further Russian aggression, the Cabinet -from which Lord Carnarvon and the Foreign Secretary, Lord Derby, both resigned - called up reserves, sent Indian troops to Malta and in June entered into a secret agreement with Turkey, undertaking to help to defend that country against further attacks. In return Britain was allowed to occupy Cyprus as what Disraeli called a place d'armes from which Russia's designs on the disintegrating Turkish Empire could be resisted.¹³

Having helped to ensure that the Treaty of San Stefano was submitted to a European congress, Disraeli left for Berlin where he so much impressed Bismarck that the Iron Chancellor was heard to observe, 'Der alte Jude, das ist der Mann.'¹⁴

Much to the relief of the Queen who had been reluctant to allow him to go, Berlin being 'decidedly too far', Disraeli returned to London with what was claimed to be peace with honour. The Queen, while regretting that Russia 'had got anything', was quite satisfied with Disraeli's work. 'High and low are delighted,' she assured him happily, 'excepting Mr Gladstone who is frantic.'¹⁵ She offered him a dukedom which he declined, having already gone to the House of Lords as the Earl of Beaconsfield. She then wrote to him to say, 'He must now accept the Garter. She must insist on it.' This he did accept, suggesting Lord Salisbury, who had succeeded Lord Derby as Foreign Secretary, should be given it too, and commenting when both of them received it, 'To become K.G. with a Cecil is something for a Disraeli.'¹⁶

The Queen listened with pleasure to his account of the successful negotiations. 'Bismarck, Madam,' he said, 'was enchanted to hear your Majesty had ordered the occupation of Cyprus. "That is progress," he said. His idea of progress is the occupation of fresh countries.' The Queen joined in the general laughter.¹⁷

She was well aware, though, that the occupation of fresh countries entailed the defence of them and that this would regrettably on occasions lead to war. From this she did not flinch. She had not done so during the Ashanti War of 1873; neither did she when the Afghan War broke out in 1878, nor yet in the Zulu War of the following year when a British force was all but annihilated at Isandhlwana and the Queen urged the Government 'not to be downhearted for a moment but show a bold front to the world' until the 'honour of Great Britain' had been restored. It much pained her, though, to have to approve of her soldiers fighting against such brave, black-skinned warriors as the Zulu King Cetewayo who should be treated well, so she told the Government when the war was over. It was almost equally painful to read of Mr Gladstone's maddening usurpation of her own right to champion the virtues and manliness of the African races, as well as his assumption of her authority to speak over the heads of parties and classes to the nation at large.

'If we are to maintain our position as a first-rate Power,' she wrote encouragingly to Lord Beaconsfield, 'we must, with our Indian Empire and large Colonies, be Prepared for attacks and wars, somewhere or other CONTINUALLY. '¹⁸ And when wars did break out, it was folly, she contended, to make a premature peace after an early setback: this would only lead to difficulties in the future. It was also folly to give up territories once they had been acquired. When the Government proposed to make over the North Sea island of Heligoland - which had been seized by the British navy in 1807 - to Germany in exchange for Zanzibar, she protested that it was 'always a bad thing' to 'give up what one has'.¹⁹

She was far from believing in war for war's sake. Yet there were occasions when conflict could not be avoided, when Britain would otherwise become 'the laughing-stock of the world'.²⁰

Chapter 49 'THE HALF-MAD FIREBRAND'

When Disraeli's Conservatives were defeated at the polls in 1880, the Queen did all she could to thwart the return to power of a man who had followed such a 'blind and destructive course' during the election campaign. She had long since decided that she 'never COULD have the slightest particle of confidence' in this awful man Mr Gladstone, 'a most disagreeable person - half crazy, and so excited', who would become a dictator if he could.¹ She would abdicate rather than have him back; she would have the more tractable Lord Granville as Prime Minister, though she did not rate his talents very highly; or she would, as Disraeli suggested, send for Lord Hartington, even though she strongly disapproved of his liaison with the Duchess of Manchester and his frequent appearances at raffish parties at Marlborough House.²

Despite the advice which had been given to her by Prince Albert in his efforts to guide her towards the creation of a new English monarchical tradition which placed the throne above party, she had never fully grasped the limits imposed upon a constitutional monarch. Indeed, Prince Albert, who often overstepped the bounds of constitutional propriety by speaking in the Queen's name, never completely comprehended these limits himself. He had seemed, on occasions, to share her endorsement of Baron Stockmar's frequently expressed opinion that the Prime Minister was merely the 'temporary head of the Cabinet', while the monarch was the 'permanent premier'. When, for instance, in 1852 on the fall of his Conservative Government, Lord Derby had proposed that Lord Lansdowne should be sent for and Lord John Russell had maintained that his own claims should be considered more deserving, the Queen, after consultations with her husband, had rejected them both and had sent for the kindly, amenable, and 'safe' Lord Aberdeen to whom the Prince had gone so far as to hand a list of names considered suitable for inclusion in the Cabinet. Similarly, when faced six years later with the prospect of having to take back Palmerston, an eager proponent of a policy in Italy to which they had been opposed, the Queen and the Prince had done all they could to deny the 'old Italian Master' the premiership and had endeavoured to bring into being a government headed by Lord Granville.

Their efforts had been in vain, just as were those of the Queen in 1880 when she endeavoured to thwart the return to power of the dreadful Mr Gladstone, the 'most disagreeable' of all her Ministers, whom, faute de mieux, she was eventually obliged to accept as Prime Minister for the second time.

At his audience on 23 April, she treated him with what he loyally described as 'perfect courtesy', while comforting herself with the thought that the seventy-year-old 'half-mad firebrand' would not be in office for long. Indeed, he told her as much himself, looking, so she thought, satisfyingly ill, old and haggard - though Henry Ponsonby considered he had never appeared more healthy.³ In the meantime, to soften the blow of having to part with 'the kindest and most devoted as well as one of the wisest Ministers' she had ever had, she proposed to continue to correspond with Disraeli 'without anyone being astonished or offended, and even more without anyone knowing about it'. 'You can,' she told him, 'be of much use to me about my family and other things and about great public questions.' She would 'never write, except on formal official matters, to the Prime Minister'.⁴

She asked Ponsonby to make it clear to Gladstone on his appointment that there must be 'no democratic leaning, no attempt to change [the previous Government's] foreign policy, no change in India, and no cutting down of estimates. In short no lowering of the high position this Country holds, and ought always to hold.'⁵

As she had feared, however, Gladstone's administration fell far short of the Queen's instructions and aspirations. It was, indeed, so she told the Crown Princess, the worst Government she 'had ever had to do with': the Foreign Secretary, Lord Granville, for instance, was 'absolutely passe' and neglected things 'in a dreadful way', while the Colonial Secretary, Lord Derby, was 'a terrible Minister' who made 'dreadful messes'. As for Gladstone - struggling under the weight of the mountainous correspondence which the Queen imposed upon him - he thought that 'she alone [was] enough to kill any man'.

When in office Disraeli had always encouraged her to believe that her political role as monarch was far more important than any but the most monarchically inclined interpreter of the British constitution would have allowed it to be. He continued to do so in opposition. When the Queen strongly objected to the evacuation of Kandahar in Afghanistan and refused to announce it as part of the Government's programme in her Speech at the opening of Parliament in 1881, the Cabinet had to threaten to resign before she gave in to them. She surrendered most grumpily, making them only too conscious of her displeasure, speaking to none of them when they next came to Osborne, and noting with relish how they 'nearly tumbled over each other going out'. Before leaving the house, however, the Home Secretary had the courage to remind her that her Speech constitutionally did not express her own views but was 'only the speech of the Ministers'. Considering this opinion most distasteful, not to say demeaning, she instructed her youngest son, Prince Leopold, to enquire what Disraeli's views were on the subject. The Home Secretary's principle, Disraeli declared, with sublime indifference to the opinion of the leading constitutional theorists of the day, was quite unfounded: it was merely 'a piece of parliamentary gossip'.⁶

This was almost the last piece of advice which Disraeli gave her. In April 1881, weakened by bronchitis and asthma and by the deleterious medicines which his doctors had prescribed, he died and was buried beside his wife at his house, Hughenden. Throughout his illness the Queen had made anxious enquiries to which he had insisted on replying, the pencil shaking in his hand; but when he was asked if he would like her to visit him, he replied, making his last sad joke, 'No, it is better not. She will only ask me to take a message to Albert.'⁷ His last authentically recorded words were, 'I had rather live but I am not afraid to die.'⁸

The Queen could 'scarcely see' for her 'fast falling tears' as she wrote to his friend and Private Secretary, Montague Corry. 'The loss is so overwhelming... Never had I so kind and devoted a Minister and very few such devoted friends. His affectionate sympathy, his wise counsel -all were so invaluable even out of office. I have lost so many dear and valued friends but none whose loss will be more keenly felt.' The blow was 'terrible', she told the Crown Princess; it made her feel quite ill, 'poorly and shaken'. Lord Beaconsfield was 'the truest, kindest friend and wisest counsellor'. And to Lord Barrington, who had acted as Lord Beaconsfield's Private Secretary when Corry had had to take his seriously ill sister abroad, the Queen wrote, 'Words are too weak to say what [she] feels; how overwhelmed she is with this terrible, irreparable loss ... His kindness to the Queen on all and every occasion she never, never can forget and will miss cruelly.'⁹

The grief was deep and unfeigned; but it was not enduring; and she soon returned, more vigorous than ever, to her condemnation of her dead friend's political opponents. Not a single one of her Liberal Ministers, she decided, was worthy of his appointment, while their leader, as Gladstone himself gloomily recorded in his diary, was kept 'at arm's length', 'outside an iron ring'. The Queen did not trouble to disguise her hope that the tiresome old man would soon have to relinquish his office.

Her attitude towards him momentarily softened when he had paid a warm tribute to his erstwhile opponent in the House of Commons: she had actually asked him to sit down at his next audience. But it was only a short-lived rapprochement; and she grew increasingly exasperated by his unwillingness to submit to what he termed her 'intolerable' and 'inadmissible' claims to be fully informed about confidential discussions in Cabinet.¹⁰ He much annoyed her by going abroad in 1883 without her permission and accepting hospitality from various foreign rulers, including the Tsar. He had irritated her even more when, standing as candidate for Midlothian, he had gone barnstorming through Scotland, making speeches about Reform, putting his head out of his railway carriage window to acknowledge the cheers of the crowd. She complained of these 'constant speeches' and expressed her utter disgust at his 'stump oratory'; and when, in his curiously insensitive way, he sent her a press cutting which referred to his 'triumphal procession', she sent it on to Ponsonby by way of Lady Ely with a note to say she hadn't read it. As Henry Ponsonby observed, commenting on her 'jealousy', 'she feels aggrieved at the undue reverence shown to an old man of whom the public are being constantly reminded ... while HM is, owing to the life she leads, withdrawn from view ... She can't bear to see the large type which heads the columns of newspapers by "Mr Gladstone's movements" while down below in small type is the Court Circular.’¹¹

The man angered her just as much when, in writing to congratulate her on Sir Garnet Wolseley's victory over the Egyptian nationalists led by Arabi Pasha at Tel-el-Kebir in September 1882, he totally neglected to note the part played in the battle by her son, Prince Arthur, the Duke of Connaught, commander of the 1st Guards Brigade, who had been described by Wolseley as 'a first rate Brigadier-General'.

This offence was followed by the Government's proposal to withdraw troops from the Sudan where a Muslim mystic, Muhammad al-Mahdi, rallying thousands of followers behind him, had proclaimed a mission to free Egypt from foreign domination. The Queen, convinced that the Mahdi must be overthrown, bombarded the Cabinet with messages urging the need for speedy and forceful action; and she was outraged when, belatedly and after ten thousand Egyptian soldiers had been killed by the rebels, General Charles George Gordon, who had been sent out to report on the situation there, found himself besieged in Khartoum.

Furious with Gladstone's Government for not acting sooner, she sent letter after letter requesting firm action. 'The Queen trembles for Gen. Gordon's safety,' she wrote to Gladstone. 'If anything befalls him, the result will be awful. '¹² But Gladstone was extremely slow in sending out troops to save Gordon, since the Mahdi's followers were 'rightly struggling to be free'; and when at last a relief force was despatched under General Wolseley, it arrived too late. General Gordon was stabbed to death near the gate of the palace in Khartoum on 26 January 1885. His head was then cut off and sent to the Mahdi and hung on a tree for three days. The Queen was aghast. She sent identical telegrams to Gladstone, Hartington, the War Minister, and Granville, the Foreign Secretary: 'These news from Khartoum are frightful, and to think that all this might have been prevented and many precious lives saved by earlier action is too frightful. '¹³ All these telegrams were sent en clair so that there could be no doubt in the public mind what she thought of her Government. This highly unconstitutional act provoked Gladstone into declaring that he would 'never set foot in Windsor again';¹⁴ while the Queen announced that her Prime Minister would 'for ever be-branded with the blood of Gordon, that heroic man'.¹⁵ The Queen was quite as cross with Hartington, who was 'very idle and [hated] business', as she was with Gladstone; and when the War Minister complained to Ponsonby of her communicating directly with generals in the field, she sent a blistering reply: 'The Queen always has telegraphed direct to her Generals, and always will do so ... She thinks Lord Hartington's letter very officious and impertinent in tone... The Queen won't stand dictation. She won't be a machine.'¹⁶

She certainly intended to communicate with whomsoever she chose; and, having written to Gordon's sister to express her grief at her brother's death and the 'stain left upon England' by the way it had come about, she wrote also to General Wolseley to warn him that the Government, some of whose members were 'very unpatriotic', might propose withdrawal from the Sudan. He was to resist such a proposal; he must also burn her letter as it was 'so very confidential'. She had already written to Lady Wolseley asking her to press her husband to 'THREATEN to resign if he does not receive strong support. It must never appear or Lord Wolseley ever let out the hint I give you. But I really think they must he frightened.'¹⁷

Nor did she intend to leave Gladstone in any doubt as to her views. It would be 'fatal' to the country's reputation and honour to withdraw from the Sudan, she told him. It would be seen as a humiliating surrender by British arms to 'savages'.

Despite the political crisis the Queen declined to come down from Balmoral. Gladstone must go to her: it was 'impertinent' of him to expect otherwise. The Prince of Wales was induced to add his voice to those pressing her to return to London or Windsor, hinting that her position as sovereign might be weakened if she did not. She remained obstinate and immovable. She could not 'rush about as a younger person and a man might do'. Mr Gladstone seemed to forget that she was a lady and an old lady at that whose strength had been severely taxed by forty-eight years of her arduous reign. 'He seems to think,' she wrote, 'that I am just a machine to run up and down as he likes.’¹⁸ Besides, her journey by train could not be arranged without due notice. Moreover, it was Ascot week and there would be so many people milling around Windsor for the races that it would be 'extremely inconvenient and unpleasant' at the Castle.¹⁹

The reprimand which Gladstone had received from the Queen after she had heard the news of Gordon's death was handed to him by a station master on his way back to London from Lancashire; and it had induced him for a time to consider handing in his resignation.

To the Queen's profound relief he was soon afterwards forced to do so after a vote against the Budget. She declined to shake hands with him when he came with the other Ministers to deliver up the seals of their offices. He asked if he might kiss her hand. She held the tips of her fingers towards him with evident distaste, and was obviously much relieved when he had gone. General Wolseley, who went to Osborne soon after this uncomfortable interview, reported to the Duke of Cambridge that the Queen was 'so rejoiced and happy to be rid of Gladstone and his filthy lot!!' She was 'like a school girl set free from school'.²⁰

The Conservative Government of Lord Salisbury which succeeded Gladstone's in June 1855 lasted but a few months, however; and in her efforts to avoid a further series of unwelcome meetings with Gladstone, the Queen once again overstepped the limits of her prerogative. At first she refused to accept the resignation of Lord Salisbury, to whom she had grown attached, then, having done so, and having given him a bronze bust of herself and offered him a dukedom, she made repeated efforts to prevent her 'dear great country' from falling into 'the reckless hands of Mr Gladstone' who would lead it to 'UTTER ruin'. Informed that the Liberals were severely critical of the delay, she sharply retorted, 'The Queen does not the least care but rather wishes it shd. be known that she has the greatest possible disinclination to take this half crazy & really in many ways ridiculous old man.'[liv]²¹

In the end, of course, she was forced to take him and did so with such an ill grace that he was 'dreadfully agitated and nervous' at his first audience.²²

'I have been forced to confide the formation of a Government to that old crazy man Merrypebble, as Louis calls him,' she told Princess Frederick. 'And I made it a condition that Pussy [Lord Granville] should not go to the FO [the Earl of Rosebery was appointed Foreign Secretary], as well as that the foreign policy should not be changed. But the bother and nuisance is dreadful ... It is a great misfortune to lose such a man as Lord Salisbury who is one of the most intelligent and large minded and unprejudiced statesmen I ever saw.'²³

Throughout the few months of this, Gladstone's third administration in 1886, she continually consulted Salisbury, seeking his advice as to the best method of ensuring that Gladstone's policies on Home Rule for Ireland were defeated and defying the convention that it was her constitutional duty to support the government in office.²⁴ In June 1886 Gladstone's Home Rule Bill was defeated, as she had hoped, believing Home Rule to be 'calamitous for Ireland, hazardous for England and tending towards separation'.²⁵ She accepted his resignation with unconcealed satisfaction and welcomed back Lord Salisbury who was so infinitely more understanding, who saw to it that she was not bothered unnecessarily and that, being an old lady, she was 'not to be overpressed', never dictated to. It was easy to see she was very fond of Salisbury, wrote a guest in his house, La Bastide, on the French riviera to which the Queen used regularly to go, often without warning, when she was on holiday near Nice at Cimiez. 'Indeed, I never saw two people get on better, their polished manners and deference to and esteem for each other were a delightful sight and one not readily to be forgotten.'²⁵

'I cannot help feeling relieved,' the Queen wrote in her journal after the defeat of the Home Rule Bill, 'and think it is best for the country.' Surely now she would not have to deal with Mr Gladstone again. He was seventy-six years old, in failing health and, in her eyes, looking ill and agitated. In the elections which followed the dissolution, Gladstone's supporters took 276 seats, Salisbury's 394.

'The elections are beyond man's understanding,' a visitor remarked to Mrs Gladstone, 'the course of events can only be guided by the One above.'

'Oh, yes,' Mrs Gladstone replied, 'and if you wait he'll be down to tea in five minutes.'²⁶ Yet, even now the Queen had not seen the last of the 'abominable' old man who returned to power after a Liberal victory in the election of 1892, a victory won by a narrow margin which prompted the Queen to comment, 'These are trying moments & it seems to me a defect in our much famed Constitution, to have to part with an admirable Govt like Ld Salisbury's for no question of any importance or any particular reason, merely on account of the number of votes.'²⁷

She did not hesitate to announce in the Court Circular that she took leave of Lord Salisbury 'with regret'; nor did she trouble to conceal her reluctance to entrust the government of the country and the protection of her empire 'to the shaking hand of an old, wild, incomprehensible man of 82V2'. When he came for his first audience he seemed quite as old as that, 'greatly altered & changed, not only much aged, walking rather bent, with a stick, but altogether; his face shrunk, deadly pale, with a weird look in his eye, a feeble expression about the mouth, & the voice altered'.²⁸ He forgot to kiss hands; and subsequently remembering the omission, he repaired it just before dinner. The Queen said coldly, 'It should have been done this afternoon.'²⁹

At least, the man's frailty, so she hoped, would make it easier for her to refuse to accept as members of his Cabinet men of whom she disapproved, whatever the country's 'much famed constitution' might be supposed to say on the subject. She objected, for instance, to Henry Labouchere, the Radical Member for Northampton, both on moral grounds - he had lived with his wife, an actress, before marriage - and for political reasons - his attacks on the monarchy in his weekly journal, Truth, were unforgivable.³⁰ Labouchere complained to Ponsonby that it was unconstitutional of her to object to his appointment; but she said it did not matter what the man said: she would not agree to have him in the Cabinet. Gladstone gave way; and, with characteristic loyalty to the throne, took upon himself the responsibility of excluding Labouchere without mentioning the Queen's veto.³¹ When the men whose appointment she did accept appeared before her, she found them 'a motley crew', particularly Sir William Harcourt, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who had grown to resemble an elephant. She was studiedly distant with them all, and thought they looked too absurd when, instead of rising to their feet after having been sworn in, they crawled forwards to kiss her hand on their knees. As for Gladstone he was more didactic than ever, 'half crazy, half silly', as well as deaf. It was really 'a farce' having to deal with the 'deluded old fanatic' on such terms as they were. He truly was impossible. That winter at Balmoral she grew quite red in the face one Sunday with the effort of suppressing her laughter when the Minister in his thick Scottish accent prayed that the Lord would bestow His wisdom upon the Queen's Cabinet 'who sorely needed it'.³² At the wedding of the Prince of Wales's son, Prince George, to Princess May of Teck, in the summer of 1893, not long before his eighty-fourth birthday, Gladstone took it upon himself to sit down in the Queen's marquee even though she had declined to shake hands with him, merely giving him 'only a very stiff bow'. 'Does he perhaps think,' she asked a cousin indignantly, 'that this is a public tent?'[lv]³³

Gladstone struggled on for another eight months until, at the end of February 1894, 'the deluded old fanatic', losing his sight and hard of hearing, felt obliged to tender his resignation. The occasion was painful for them both: she could not bring herself to express the sentiments which he longed to hear, nor even to thank him for his long service; and the letter she wrote to him afterwards was scarcely less formal than her manner. She would confer a peerage on him, she said; but she knew he would not accept it.³⁴

To Mrs Gladstone she behaved less coldly. She asked her and her husband to stay at Windsor the night before his resignation. The next morning after breakfast Catherine Gladstone, in tears, assured the Queen that her husband had always been devoted to Her Majesty and to the Crown. 'She repeated this twice,' the Queen wrote, '& begged me to allow her to tell him that I believed it which I did; for I am convinced it is the case, though at times his actions might have made it difficult to believe. She spoke of former days & how long he had known me & dear Albert. I kissed her when she left.'³⁵

Without asking for Gladstone's advice as to a successor, the Queen sent for Lord Rosebery.

She liked Rosebery; but his relationship with her, complicated by his acute shyness which sometimes brought out her own, was not an easy one. She treated him as though he were a small boy in constant need of advice and admonition, perpetually criticizing his speeches which ought to be 'less jocular', more 'serious' in tone, 'more befitting a Prime Minister'. A speech at Bradford in which he referred to the House of Lords, 'that permanent barrier against the Liberal Party' as 'a great national danger', was particularly objectionable. She reprimanded him sternly for speaking in such a manner without consulting her, without 'obtaining her sanction'.³⁶ His policies, she objected, often seemed framed merely 'with the sole purpose of flattering useless Radicals'. His Government, weak and divided, was short-lived; and Rosebery, unhappy in office, was by no means sorry to see it disintegrate. The Queen welcomed back Lord Salisbury who remained in power for the rest of her reign.

When Gladstone died in May 1898 the Queen could not bring herself to feel the least regret and was much annoyed when the Prince of Wales, who had the greatest respect for Gladstone, a man utterly unlike himself, acted as pall-bearer at his funeral. What advice had he taken and what precedent had he followed for doing such a thing? his mother demanded to know. In a mood of rare defiance, the Prince replied shortly that he had not taken any advice and knew of no precedent.³⁷

Nor could the Queen bring herself at first to write to Mrs Gladstone to express her regret at her husband's death. She had to concede 'he was a good & vy religious man', that he was 'full of ideas for bettering the advancement of the country', that he was always 'most loyal' to her personally and 'ready to do anything for the Royal Family'; but she could not agree that he was a great Englishman. He was 'a clever man, full of talent, but he never tried to keep up the honour and prestige of Gt Britain. He tried to separate England from Ireland and to set class against class.' The harm he did could not 'easily be undone'.³⁸ When Harriet Phipps asked her if she really was not going to write to Mrs Gladstone, she said, 'No, I did not like the man. How can I say I am sorry when I am not?'³⁹ All she could do was to tell the widow, in a tribute afterwards printed in The Times, that her husband was 'one of the most distinguished statesmen of [her] reign' and that she would 'gratefully remember how anxious he always was to help and serve me and mine in all that concerned [her] personal welfare and that of [her] family'.⁴⁰

She could never, however, bring herself to recognize fully Gladstone's great talents and virtues, either in his lifetime or after his death. His 'mixture of politics and religion' was objectionable; his tendency to treat her opinions and the information she was able to relay to him without apparent interest was exasperating; his appeal to the people and the respect which they felt for him aroused her deepest jealousy; the impression that he gave of being satisfied that he always knew best she found profoundly irritating. She was amused when Lord Salisbury told her that no one could understand how Gladstone managed to listen to a sermon without rising to his feet to reply.⁴¹

Yet Gladstone was almost pathetically grateful when the Queen's behaviour to him was gracious, when, most unusually, he and his wife were asked to Windsor, and when, on the occasion of their last meeting in France in March 1897, she was 'very decidedly kind' and actually shook hands with him, a privilege which he 'apprehended was rather rare with men' and which, so he said, 'had never happened with me during all my life'.⁴²

Gladstone compared the Queen's attitude towards him to that of his own towards a mule which had carried him for miles when he had been on holiday in Sicily. 'I had been on the back of the beast for many scores of miles ... It had rendered me much valuable service. But ... I could not get up the smallest shred of feeling for the brute. I could neither love nor like it.'⁴³

Chapter 50 GOLDEN JUBILEE

'Never, never can I forget this brilliant year,' the Queen wrote in her journal as 1887, the year of her Golden Jubilee, came to an end, a year 'so full of marvellous kindness, loyalty & devotion of so many millions which I really could hardly have expected. '¹

She was not the only person to be surprised, since there had recently been a resurgence of criticism in the press of her continued avoidance of those appearances in public from which she still shrank; and at a Liberal parliamentary dinner a large number of the guests remained in their seats when the loyal toast was proposed, several of them not only declining to stand but even hissing.

She had at first refused to consider celebrating her fiftieth year on the throne in public, even though, apart from her grandfather, George III, only two other English monarchs, Henry III and Edward III, had reigned so long. She complained of rheumatism and backache and often felt unaccountably tired in the late afternoon. But the enthusiasm of the Prince of Wales, a master of the art of ceremony, eventually won her over, though she steadfastly refused to consider celebrating the event on the exact anniversary of her accession since that was also the day on which her uncle, William IV, had died; and she had always refused to perform any public duties which coincided with the anniversaries of the deaths of members of her family, almost all of which she remembered with distressing accuracy.

By March, preparations for the Jubilee were well in hand. Medals were struck and coins minted; designs approved for presents of Jubilee brooches and tie pins; convicts were released from prison and sentences remitted; arrangements were made for ladies who had been innocent parties in divorce proceedings to be admitted to Court. There were foundation stones to lay and buildings to open in commemoration of the great event: in March the Queen went to Birmingham to lay the foundation stone of the new red brick and terracotta Law Courts designed by Sir Aston Webb and Ingress Bell; after this there was another foundation stone to lay, that of T. E. Collcutt's Imperial Institute in South Kensington. In May she was driven to the East End of London to open the Queen's Hall of the People's Palace in the Mile End Road where she was annoyed to hear a 'horrid noise', booing, she believed it was called, an unpleasant sound which was 'quite new' to the Queen's ears. She was assured that it did not reflect a general antipathy: socialists and the worst sort of Irish were responsible for it.²

On the morning of 20 June, a fine, sunny day, she drove to Windsor Station after breakfast at Frogmore, then from Paddington to Buckingham Palace which was crowded with royal relations. At the Palace she wrote in her journal, 'The day has come and I am alone, though surrounded by many dear children ... God has sustained me through many great trials and sorrows.'

At dinner that evening, a 'large family dinner', she sat between King Christian IX of Denmark and the Princess of Wales's brother, King George I of Greece. Opposite her was Leopold II, King of the Belgians, son of her beloved Uncle, who had died in 1865.³

All these royalties and many others, among them her son-in-law, the Crown Prince Frederick, resplendent in a white and silver uniform, accompanied her the next day to a thanksgiving service in Westminster Abbey, she herself being driven in an open landau, facing her daughter-in-law, the Princess of Wales, and her daughter, the Crown Princess. The noise of the cheering was deafening. Lady Geraldine Somerset, lady-in-waiting to the Duchess of Cambridge, wrote of the 'masses and millions of people thronging the streets like an anthill, and every window within sight and every roof of every house, men hanging on the chimneys! There was never anything seen like it ... And their enthusiasm! The Duke ... told us he had never seen anything like the enthusiasm anywhere!! It was one continuous roar of cheering from the moment [the Queen] came out of the door of her Palace till the instant she got back to it: Deafening.'⁴

She had been pressed to dress up for the occasion and wear a crown; but she had resolutely refused to do so, neither Ministers nor her family being able to change her mind, the Princess of Wales declaring that she had never been so snubbed when, as a 'special favourite' of the Queen, she had been asked to raise the subject with her.⁵ The Queen did, however, agree to put on something rather out of the ordinary after the Duke of Edinburgh, who had obtained leave from his duties as Commander-in-Chief in the Mediterranean, had said to her coaxingly, 'Now, Mother. You must have something really smart.'⁶ So she agreed to make some concession to the grandeur and celebratory nature of the occasion by donning a bonnet set off with white lace and diamonds and by wearing some of her many orders.

On her approach to the Abbey the congregation - alerted by particularly vociferous cheers that greeted the appearance of the Queen of the Sandwich Islands and the driver of a water cart passing the nearby church of St Margaret - hastily put away their newspapers and the wrapping of their sandwiches.

The Queen walked slowly up the aisle with the aid of her walking stick as the organist played a Handel march. She sat 'alone' thinking of her 'beloved husband, for whom this would have been such a proud day!' On her return to Buckingham Palace there was a late luncheon followed by a naval parade, then a gathering in the ballroom for the distribution of presents, then dinner for which she wore a new dress embroidered with silver English roses, Irish shamrocks and Scottish thistles, and after this there was a firework display which she watched from the Chinese Room, feeling 'half-dead with fatigue'.

During the next few days there were receptions and garden parties, naval and military reviews, a visit to the Albert Hall which had been taken over for the occasion by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the Battersea Dogs' Home, of which she was Patron, a tribute from the boys at Eton who sang the Eton Boating Song within the precincts of Windsor Castle and cheered her to the echo when she thanked them in her clear, melodious voice, and a special treat for tens of thousands of poorer children who were shepherded into Hyde Park where they were given buns and Jubilee mugs, sang 'God Save the Queen' ('somewhat out of tune', so Her Majesty thought) and watched in awe as an immense balloon rose into the sky and one little girl announced that the person in the basket was Queen Victoria being carried up to heaven.⁷

The celebrations ended with an immense garden party which the Duke of Cambridge described to his mother:

He gave us a full account, how very pretty it was, and well done and well managed; the Queen doing her part admirably again; she spoke to great numbers, going about a great deal, right and left.8

Clouding the Queen's enjoyment of the celebrations was the presence of her grandson, Prince Wilhelm of Prussia. She had not wanted to invite him; but the Crown Princess had written to her to say that her son really 'ought to be present' as her 'eldest Grand Child'. 'He need only stay for a very few days,' she added. 'He has behaved very badly to you - and to us - but I fear it would only do harm in every way to appear to take more notice of his behaviour than it is worth! It is well not to give him a handle for saying he is ill treated! ... He fancies himself of immense importance & service to the State - to his country, thinks he is indispensable to Bismarck and the Emperor! As he has little heart or Zartgefuhl [tact] - and as his conscience & intelligence have been completely wharped [sic] by the ... people in whose hands he is, he is not aware of the mischief he does ... His staying away would only be used by the Party against you & Fritz & me!'⁹

As it happened, Prince Wilhelm had already taken it for granted that he would be invited and, moreover - supposing that his father was too ill himself to travel - that he would represent his aged grandfather, the Kaiser, in London. Without consulting his father he wrote to the Queen to inform her of this arrangement. She was naturally much annoyed and when her son-in-law told her he was well enough to travel, she wrote to tell him how delighted she was, ending her letter: 'So fare well, beloved Fritz. God bless you and keep you for a very very long time to come in the best of health for the sake of the happiness and well-being of your country and Europe. Ever your faithful Mama, VRI.'¹⁰ To her grandson she despatched a brief telegram: 'Am delighted dear Papa is quite able to come. You will therefore only bring 2 gentlemen. '¹¹

Greatly irritated by this slight, Prince Wilhelm was even more outspoken than usual about his grandmother: it was 'high time the old woman died ... She causes trouble, more than one would think. Well, England should look out when I have something to say about things ... One cannot have enough hatred for England. '¹²

The Prince's reception in England exacerbated his anger. 'Pr. W and the Princess [Dona, his wife] were received with exquisite coolness, with bare courtesy,' commented a German lady-in-waiting. 'He only saw his grandmother a couple of times, at Court functions. She was always placed behind the black Queen of Hawaii!! Both returned not in the best of tempers. '¹³

Prince Wilhelm went straight to his grandfather to complain of his insulting treatment in London. He expressed his anger also to his father's court marshall who commented: Wilhelm 'opened his heart to me regarding his mother, and I saw that he hates her dreadfully. His bitterness knows no bounds. What will come of all this?'

Chapter 51 DIE ENGLANDERIN

It had been noticed before leaving the Abbey - when her sons and sons-in-law came forward to pay their homage to the Queen and to kiss her hand - that, as the Crown Prince Frederick took a step backwards having paid his homage, she held out her hand to him again, drew him towards her and for a moment held him in her arms.¹

A month before, on 19 May 1887, a telegram had been received from the Crown Princess who had asked her mother to send to Germany the English surgeon, Morell Mackenzie, an acknowledged authority on diseases of the throat, the second volume of whose authoritative work on the subject had been recently published. He was required to attend the Crown Prince who, having caught a severe cold the previous autumn, had since been troubled with a hoarseness of voice which his German doctors believed might be caused by a cancerous lump on his larynx. Before an operation to remove it was performed, however, a specialist's opinion was required. Mackenzie had left Harley Street immediately for Germany, preceded by a warning to her daughter from the Queen that, while Mackenzie was 'certainly ... very clever', he was greedy for money and honours and was disliked by others in his profession.² In Germany, Mackenzie cut away a small part of the growth which, sent for analysis, proved benign. All thoughts of a major operation had, therefore, been abandoned; and soon afterwards, the Crown Prince had left for London to attend his mother-in-law's Jubilee celebrations. After the Jubilee the Crown Prince and Princess went to Scotland to stay near Balmoral at the Fife Arms, Braemar, where Morell Mackenzie again examined the Prince's throat and declared himself 'very pleased' with its condition. As though in reward for his encouraging diagnosis, the Prince wrote to his mother-in-law asking that Mackenzie be knighted. The Queen accordingly wrote to the Prime Minister with this request, adding 'he certainly saved the C. Prince's life & seems really to have cured him'.³ Lord Salisbury replied, 'There can be no objection to the bestowal of Knighthood on the doctor who saved the life of Your Majesty's son-in-law. Perhaps it might be well to wait till the cure is generally known to be quite complete.'⁴ Despite this cautionary advice Mackenzie was knighted a few weeks later.

From Scotland the Crown Prince was taken, via London, to Toblach in the Tyrol where Mackenzie once more examined him and, with an optimism which proved to be unfounded, declared himself, according to the Crown Princess, 'not unsatisfied about Fritz's throat in the main'.⁵ From Toblach the Crown Prince went to Venice by way of Trent on the advice of Mackenzie who, so one of the German doctors declared, had 'developed a taste for "travel expenses" '⁶. Mackenzie's reports from Venice were rather less encouraging; but when his patient had been moved from there to Baveno on Lago Maggiore he was declared to be 'getting on very nicely', and he himself wrote to his mother-in-law to tell her that he was progressing quite well. At the beginning of November 1887, however, two days after he had moved again, this time to San Remo on the Riviera, an alarming swelling was discovered in a new place and Mackenzie now agreed with his German colleagues that their patient was suffering from cancer of the larynx.⁷

Meanwhile in Germany, where all manner of reports were circulating about the behaviour of the Crown Princess, die Englanderin, including a rumour that she was having an affair with her court marshal, Count Gotz von Seckendorff, demands were being made that she should bring her husband home. Amongst the other attacks on her - which were described by her mother in a letter of protest to the British Ambassador in Berlin as 'shameful' - it was alleged that she was preventing an operation being carried out, preferring to risk the Prince's life rather than lose the chance of becoming Empress upon the death of her father-in-law, the Emperor Wilhelm I, who was himself expected to die quite soon. It was also suggested that, since the Prince was too ill to reign, the crown should pass to his son, Prince Wilhelm, when the Emperor died.

Prince Wilhelm arrived in San Remo with the intention of taking his father back to Berlin with him. But his mother refused to allow her husband to be moved.

'You ask how Willie was when he was here,' she reported to the Queen after her son's departure. 'He was as rude, as disagreeable as impertinent to me as possible when he arrived, but I pitched into him with, I am afraid, considerable violence, and he became quite nice and gentle and amiable (for him) ... He thought he was to save his Papa fr. my mismanagement!!. When he has not his head stuffed with rubbish at Berlin he is quite nice and "traitable" ... but I will not have him dictate to me, the head on my shoulders is every bit as good as his.'⁸

The Queen was distressed to learn that her grandson had been persuaded that he should inherit the Kaiser's throne because his father was too ill to do so. It was a 'monstrous idea', she said. 'It must never be allowed - Fritz is capable of doing and directing anything and this must be stopped at once.' 'You have every reason to feel angry and annoyed,' she added in a subsequent letter when her daughter told her that her second son, Heinrich, was being as difficult as Wilhelm, maintaining, so she said, 'that his papa is lost through the English doctors and me ... He is quite dreadful in this respect!! He is so prejudiced, and fancies that he knows better than his Mama and all the doctors here ... He is as foolish as he is obstinate & pigheaded and ... becomes so rude and impertinent that I can really not stand it.'⁹

On 10 March 1888 news reached San Remo that the old Emperor of Germany, Wilhelm I, had died and that, consequently, the Crown Prince was now the Emperor Frederick III. In a brief ceremony in the drawing room of the Villa Zirio, he took off his Order of the Black Eagle and, unable to speak, he drafted a note of thanks to Sir Morell Mackenzie for enabling him to live long enough to 'recompense the valiant courage' of his wife. As he placed the Order round her shoulders, she burst into tears.¹⁰ Years before, she had told her mother that there was no one as blessed as she was in having such a husband and that there were 'great trials or sorrows awaiting' her. Now that time had come.¹¹ 'Poor Fritz succeeding his father as a sick and stricken man is so hard!!' she wrote to her mother, 'How much good he might have done!'¹²

'My OWN dear Empress Victoria,' the Queen replied, 'it does seem an impossible dream, may God bless her! You know how little I care for rank or Titles - but I cannot deny that after all that has been done and said, I own I am thankful and proud that dear Fritz and you should have come to the Throne. '¹³

They were not to occupy it together for long; and the Queen had 'no words to express' her 'indignation and astonishment' at the thoughtlessness which their son, the Crown Prince Wilhelm, displayed in his eagerness to succeed to it. His mother had expressed the hope that her husband might be spared long enough 'to be a blessing to his people and to Europe'; but it was clear when the Queen went to see him at Charlottenburg in April 1888 that he had but a short time to live.

Her Ministers had not wanted the Queen to go to Germany. Lord Salisbury warned her that Bismarck was 'in one of his raging moods' about the proposed marriage between the new Emperor's daughter, Victoria, known as 'Moretta', and Alexander of Battenberg, known as 'Sandro', a marriage which the Queen had at first promoted and the Chancellor had proscribed. Salisbury also warned her that there was likely to be trouble with her grandson, the Crown Prince Wilhelm, the impatient heir to the throne, who was now behaving in a more than usually obstreperous way. But the Queen had been determined to go. It was, she had insisted, a purely private visit. A telegram was despatched to the Empress: 'I shall bring my own matrass - leave it to you to say who I must see or not, besides my Grandchildren and Great Grandchildren, but beg not many.'¹⁴

When her train arrived at Charlottenburg station, her daughter and all her daughter's children were there to welcome her. She was taken to the Palace where she was shown up to rooms once occupied by Frederick the Great; and, after she 'had tidied [herself] up a bit', she was conducted to the Emperor's bedroom. 'He was lying in bed,' she wrote, 'and he raised up both his hands with pleasure at seeing me and gave me a nosegay. It was very touching and sad to see him thus in bed. '¹⁵

Afterwards, when she and her daughter were alone together, 'Vicky cried a good deal, poor dear'. 'Besides her cruel anxiety about dear Fritz,' she added, 'she has so many worries and unpleasantnesses', not least those occasioned by Bismarck's antagonism.¹⁶

When the Queen herself had a conversation with Bismarck the next day, however, she found him surprisingly friendly, not at all like the monster whom Vicky had described as 'the most mischievous and dangerous person alive'.¹⁷ He had been much agitated before the interview, asking whereabouts the Queen would be in her room and would she be standing up or sitting; and, once in her presence, although the conversation was by no means contentious, he clearly found the old lady quite formidable, while she, for her part, had been 'agreeably surprised' to find him 'so amiable and gentle'. He came out of her room mopping his brow, according to her assistant private secretary, Arthur Bigge. 'Mem Gott! That was a woman!' he declared. 'One could do business with her!' Later, he modified this impression by telling a colleague that 'Grandma behaved quite sensibly at Charlottenburg'.¹⁸

The next day the Queen returned to the railway station. Her daughter went with her and spent some time with her in her carriage. 'I kissed her again and again,' the Queen recorded in her journal that night. 'She struggled hard not to give way, but finally broke down, and it was terrible to see her standing there in tears while the train slowly moved off, and to think of all she was suffering and might have to go through. My poor child, what would I not do to help her in her hard lot. '¹⁹

A few weeks later the Emperor's illness took a turn for the worse. He had taxed his strength by insisting on attending the wedding of his son, Heinrich, to Princess Irene of Hesse; and by the middle of June he was finding it a struggle to swallow and had to be fed through a tube. It was considered advisable to send for Crown Prince Wilhelm who arrived with his wife, Augusta of Schleswig-Holstein, known as 'Dona', and immediately began bossing everyone about.

The day after her son's arrival the Empress, on entering her husband's room, realized that the end was near. Her one thought, she told her mother, was 'to help him over the inevitable end'. She asked him if he was tired; and he answered her in his hoarse whisper, 'Oh very, very.' 'Gradually his dear eyes took on a different look,' she wrote. 'We held a light up, but he did not blink at all ... He no longer seemed conscious, coughed hard once more, took a deep breath three times then gave an involuntary jerk and closed his eyes tight as if something was hurting him! Then everything was quiet.'²⁰

'I am his widow,' she told her mother that same day, 'no more his wife. How am I to bear it? You did, and I will do.'²¹ 'Darling, darling unhappy child,' the Queen wrote as soon as she heard of the Emperor's death. 'I clasp you in my arms, for this is a double, dreadful grief, a misfortune untold and to the world at large. You are far more sorely tried than me. I had not the agony of seeing another fill the place of my Angel husband wh. I always felt I never could have borne.'²² 'I am broken-hearted,' she told the Crown Prince Wilhelm who had succeeded to his father's throne. 'Help and do all you can for your poor dear mother and try to follow in your best, noblest, and kindest of father's footsteps. Grandmama, V.R.I.'²³ None of her own sons, she confided to her journal, 'could be a greater loss'. Her son-in-law's death was a 'calamity' for the whole of Europe 'as well as for his own country'.²⁴

Far from following his grandmother's advice, the young Kaiser - who even before his father's death had, in his mother's words, fancied himself 'completely the Emperor - and an absolute & autocratic one'²⁵ - behaved as though his father had been a traitor to his country, having the drawers of his writing desk emptied in a search for secret state papers, and marching about the room accusing his mother of hiding them.²⁶

In fact she had already taken the precaution of asking her mother if she could bring all her private papers and those of her husband to England when they came over for the Jubilee celebrations in the summer of 1887. The Queen had readily agreed to this request and three wooden chests of papers had accordingly been handed over at Windsor Castle by the Crown Prince in July.²⁷ In May the next year a fourth chest containing further important documents had secretly been sent to Windsor, followed by yet another chest sent by way of the British Ambassador in Berlin who was led to believe that it contained jewels.²⁸

Against his mother's wishes the new Kaiser now ordered a post-mortem of his father's remains and authorized the publication of a pamphlet which, while praising the behaviour of the late Emperor's German doctors, condemned the treatment of the British interlopers. 'An English doctor killed my father,' he stated publicly, 'and an English doctor crippled my arm - and this we owe to my mother who would not have Germans about her!'[lvi]²⁹

Chapter 52 THE DAUGHTERS

When Princess Alice, the Queen's second daughter, attempted to persuade her mother to come out of her seclusion she caused quite as much offence as the Queen's Ministers did when they suggested it. She was sharply told that her mother must live the best way she found that she could in order to get through all the work she had to do. 'I require,' she said, 'to shape my own life and ways.'

Although she was no more than eighteen years old when her father died, Princess Alice, a pretty, sympathetic girl, had more or less taken over the running of the household while the Queen was in the first agonies of her grief, sleeping in her mother's room, seeing Ministers on her behalf, and doing all she could to comfort the grievously mourning widow. The Queen, indeed, came so much to rely upon her that when, less than six months after the Prince Consort's death, Princess Alice married Prince Louis of Hesse-Darmstadt, her mother parted from her with the utmost reluctance, comforting herself with the thought that she and her husband would be able to spend much of their time in England, 'Louis not having any duties to detain him much at home at present'.¹

For a long time the Queen - who had found the charming and graceful Alice most 'obliging' - had insisted that she would not let the girl marry so long as she could 'reasonably delay her doing so'. As she had told King Leopold in April 1859, 'I shall not let her marry for as long as I can.'² But then the Princess had met Prince Louis and, although Lord Clarendon described him as a 'dull boy', coming from 'a dull family in a dull country', she herself thought him delightful, while the Queen was also much taken with him: he was, if 'very shy and blushing when one talks to him about Alice', 'a dear, pleasant, bright companion, full of fun and spirits ... natural and unaffected - so quick-witted and taking an interest in everything and I think him so good-looking'.³ The Duchess of Cambridge might well consider it 'an insignificant match'; but the Queen contended that 'great matches' did not 'make for happiness', often, in fact, causing great 'annoyance'. Better a thousand times not marry at all, she thought, 'than marry for marrying's sake'. This was advice she continued to press upon her children and their children for the rest of her life. 'I know full well,' she was to write to Princess Alice's daughter, Victoria, 'that you don't wish to be married for marrying's sake & to have a position. I know darling Child that you would never do this, & dear Mama had a horror of it; but it is a very German view of things ... I have told ... dear Papa that you were far too young to think of it, & that your ist duty was to stay with him, and to be as it were the "Mistress of the House", as so many eldest daughters are to their Fathers when God has taken their beloved mother away.'⁴

As the day of Alice's 'wretched' wedding approached, the Queen had made it clear that she dreaded it. As at the Prince of Wales's wedding, she was almost hidden from view, this time by her four sons who surrounded her in the dining room at Osborne where the gloomy ceremony was conducted on 1 July 1862. After it was over the Queen broke down in floods of tears and was soon writing to Princess Alice to complain that she ought to spend more time in England than she evidently intended to do. There was, after all, nothing much for her to do in Darmstadt; it was selfish of Louis and his family to keep her there. She ought to be as much with her mother as possible. 'A married daughter,' she wrote, 'I MUST have living with me, and must not be left constantly to look about for help, and to have to make shift for the day which is too dreadful.'⁵

So, frequently complaining that Princess Alice spent far too much time in her husband's duchy, the Queen turned to her next daughter, Helena, 'Lenchen' as she was known in the family, to take her sister's place. At the time of Alice's wedding, Helena was sixteen years old, a kindly, sensible, but rather plain, dowdy and ungainly girl; and, as with Alice, her mother was possessively determined to keep her at home as long as she could, although she had no high opinion of her personality or deportment. 'Poor dear Lenchen,' the Queen wrote of her, 'though most useful and active and clever and amiable, does not improve in looks and has great difficulty with her figure and her want of calm, quiet, graceful manners.'

'I don't intend she should marry,' the Queen wrote the year after Alice's marriage,⁶ 'till nineteen or twenty.' And, even then, her husband, as she had hoped of Alice's, must make England his 'principal home'. The husband chosen for her, Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg, was perfectly amenable in this respect. Unfortunately, he was not very desirable in any other: he smoked incessantly, which made him cough; his teeth were bad; he had very little hair and hardly any money; he had only one eye and at dinner parties would ask a footman to bring in a tray containing his glass eyes. 'He would explain the history of each at great length, his favourite being a blood-shot eye which he wore when he had a cold.'⁷ He was fifteen years older than his intended bride and was generally acknowledged to be very boring. The Prince of Wales disapproved of the match; so did his wife who had hoped that Helena might marry her brother, the Crown Prince Frederick of Denmark; so did his sister, Alice, who was upbraided by her mother for interfering: it was 'monstrous' of her to do so when the Queen, her parent and sovereign, had settled the 'thing for Helena's good'.⁸

So Princess Helena was married on 5 July 1866 in St George's Chapel, Windsor, where, to general surprise, the Queen gave her daughter away, explaining, 'I was the only one to do it. I never could let one of my sons take their father's place while I live.'⁹

As agreed, the bride and her husband settled down at Windsor, first at Frogmore then, after Prince Christian's appointment as Ranger of Windsor Park, at Cumberland Lodge. The arrangement was not to prove a very satisfactory one: the Queen was to find Helena - who, like so many of her contemporaries, became addicted to laudanum - 'difficult to live with'; while Prince Christian proved quite as tedious in the Queen's opinion as he did in everyone else's. He was also very idle: one day the Queen, glancing out of her sitting-room window, saw him lounging about in the garden, smoking. She felt constrained to send him a note telling him to find something more constructive to do. In spite of his constant smoking he lived to be eighty-six. Princess Helena's next sister, Louise, was considered no more satisfactory as a daughter than Princess Helena. A talented sculptress whose work was shown at the Royal Academy, she was good looking, outspoken, independent, indiscreet, often caustic and, in her mother's opinion, 'the most difficult' of all her daughters. There was never a question of her staying at home as a help and companion to the Queen who was perfectly ready to see her married when she came of age.

The candidate selected for her as a husband, although rumoured to be homosexual, was the Marquess of Lome, heir to the eighth Duke of Argyll and grandson of the Queen's old friend, the Duchess of Sutherland, in happier years gone by her Mistress of the Robes. He was said to be a clever young man who wrote poetry. He had been found a seat in the House of Commons as Member for Argyllshire. Princess Louise was fond of him. So was the Queen who found him 'very pleasing, amiable and clever', though she did 'not fancy' him at first, complaining of his 'forward manner' and his unpleasant voice, the result of an injury sustained at Eton. Also there were grumbles from the Tories in the Household because Lome sat in the Commons as a Liberal; and the Crown Princess did not approve, advocating a Prussian Prince, much to the annoyance of her mother who wrote to the Prince of Wales to protest against these 'foreign alliances' which, so often, meant that family feelings were 'rent asunder'. 'Beloved Papa' had advocated them, to be sure; but that was before Bismarck's Prussia had 'swallowed everything up'.¹⁰

There would be problems about precedence, of course, with Princess Louise married to a subject, the first time such a marriage had taken place in England since King Henry VIII's sister, Mary, had married Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. And already the Queen considered that the Duke of Argyll was being rather too familiar as a future member of her family. 'I believe "Eliza" is a little nervous about the whole thing,' commented Henry Ponsonby. She 'is not accustomed to such intimacy with a subject'. He himself, however, was thankful that there was no 'talking now of this or that Seidlitz-Stinkinger', while the Queen eventually persuaded herself, or at least told Vicky, that the match had been greeted everywhere as the 'most popular act' of her reign. As for the future bride, she was not so concerned as others were about matters of precedence, about whether, for instance, she would be Princess Louise in her mother's houses and merely Lady Lome in her husband's. At least, as she told Ponsonby, with a side swipe at John Brown, she was quite sure she did not want 'an absurd man in a kilt' following her everywhere.¹¹

Louise was married on 24 March 1871 at Windsor with far more ceremony than Alice and Helena had been. Her mother led the procession up the nave, to the strains of the bridegroom's family's marching song, 'The Campbells are Coming', the severity of her black dress offset by diamonds and rubies.¹² Soon afterwards the bride moved into apartments in Kensington Palace, outside which still stands the marble statue she created of her mother in her coronation robes.

She was often at odds with other members of her family and the Household. Marie Mallet found her 'fascinating, but oh, so ill-natured. I positively dread talking to her, not a soul escapes ... Never have I come across a more dangerous woman, to gain her end she would stick at nothing.'[lvii] Mrs Mallet later decided, however, that she was 'at her best' when people were in trouble and this was 'a redeeming feature in her most complex character'. She trusted she would 'make up her quarrels and be a help to the Queen'.¹³

Louise was never of much help to the Queen though, and in long conversations with Dr Reid, with whom she was on the best of terms, she made no secret of her belief that her mother should abdicate in favour of the Prince of Wales. Her mother was, she said, no longer fit to reign and was 'reducing the future role of the Prince of Wales to a nonentity'.¹⁴

Chapter 53 THE SONS

The Queen exercised as much control over her sons as over her daughters. Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, like her eldest son, Bertie, was alternately a source of great worry to her and an object of affection. He was, she once regretted, 'reserved, touchy, vague and wilful', a 'great, great grief. Yet when he came home on leave, after having been sent to sea at a tender age, so much against her wishes, he was greatly improved. He was so like his 'dearest Papa', though not, of course, so handsome, that she was delighted to see the 'good, dear, clever' boy again. 'Bless him,' she wrote. 'He is such a dear, dear boy ... We have not had a single fault to find with him since he has been here.' He was 'very clever and intelligent' and talked 'so sensibly and pleasantly' about all he had seen: everybody was pleased with her 'dear darling'.¹ He had always had so many interests, unlike that 'nameless youth', his elder brother. He collected stamps; he took photographs; he played the violin though not very well, and wrote music for it, though not very good music. He was a competent draughtsman; he painted watercolours. Unfortunately, he did not always observe her rule that servants should be treated in a kindly manner, forgetting that 'civility and consideration for servants' was a thing which the Queen was 'very particular about'.² On one occasion she had cause to reprimand him severely: he must 'not treat servants etc. as many do, as soldiers, which does great harm and which especially in the Queen's home is totally out of place and she will not tolerate it.'[lviii]³

When Prince Alfred went back to sea again, however, there was another cause for complaint: he forgot the eighteenth anniversary of his parents' wedding and had to be sent a curt telegram demanding to know if he remembered what day it was.[lix] Not only was he forgetful; when he came home again, he was grumpy and offhand, impatient with the servants and junior members of the Household whom he treated - though his mother repeatedly told him not to - like recalcitrant seamen. He also had a very quick temper and was notoriously avaricious. In 1862, the year after his father's death, while serving with the Mediterranean Fleet, he dealt his mother what she described as 'a heavy blow to her weak and shattered frame', proving himself 'both heartless and dishonourable', by becoming involved with a young woman on Malta just as his elder brother had disgraced himself in Ireland the year before. He was forgiven the following year, however, when he was described as being 'liker and liker to blessed Papa'. But the improvement was transitory. 'I am not as proud of Affie as you might think,' she wrote to the Crown Princess after he had been shot and wounded by a Fenian in Australia, 'for he is so conceited himself and at the present moment receives ovations as if he had done something - instead of God's mercy having spared his life ... Yes, Affie is a great, great grief - and I may say a source of bitter anger for he is not led astray. His conduct is gratuitous.'⁴ Then he gave further offence by his determination to marry the plain but extremely rich Grand Duchess Marie Alexandrovna, only daughter of Tsar Alexander II, who was head of a family which his mother particularly disliked as being 'false' and 'half-Oriental'. She wished to see the girl before the marriage took place; and was very cross when her father declined to bring her over for inspection. She was even more angry when Princess Alice supported the Tsarina's suggestion that the Queen herself should go over to the Continent to meet the girl at Cologne. 'You have entirely taken the Russian side,' she wrote to her daughter, 'and I do not think, dear child, that you should tell me who have been nearly 20 years longer on the throne than the Emperor of Russia and am Doyenne of Sovereigns, and who am a Reigning Sovereign which the Empress is not, what I ought to do. I think I know that.'⁵

So the Queen did not meet the Grand Duchess Marie before the wedding, which took place in St Petersburg on 23 January 1874, the bridegroom appearing for the occasion in the uniform of a Russian naval captain, much to the Queen's displeasure. However, when she eventually did meet her new daughter-in-law she liked her very well. She seemed good-natured, natural and intelligent; not in the least shy or nervous in the presence of the Queen, who liked her all the more for that. The satisfaction was not mutual. Her family in Russia heard that the Duchess found her visits to Windsor and Osborne 'boring beyond belief, that English food was 'abominable', the late hours at Court 'very tiring', and London, where she and her husband lived at Clarence House, 'hideous'. As for her husband, it was obvious that she found his heavy drinking tiresome and his evil temper exasperating. She was relieved when he went back to sea as captain of the ironclad Sultan in the Mediterranean.

Prince Arthur, who was created Duke of Connaught and Strathearn in 1874, had never caused his mother the anxiety which his elder brothers had. Indeed, ever since Winterhaher had painted him on his first birthday receiving a present from his godfather, the Duke of Wellington, whose birthday it also was, Prince Arthur had given his mother little trouble at any time. She 'adored little Arthur from the day of his birth', she once told his governor. 'He has never given us a day's sorrow or trouble.' It was clear that he was her favourite son, dearer', she once confided in his father, 'than any of the others put together, thus after you he is the dearest and most precious object to me on Earth ... It gives me a pang if any fault is found in his looks and character, and the bare thought of his growing out of my hands and being exposed to danger - makes the tears come to my eyes.'⁶ He was her 'precious love', really the 'best child [she] ever saw'.⁷

Well-behaved, polite, obedient, modest, he was a model child. He gave excellent performances in the children's plays when his younger brother, Prince Leopold, turned his back on the audience and General Grey's son was 'a stick'. Prince Arthur's one fault seemed to be that, as he grew older, he was rather too formal with servants. His mother urged him, as she had urged Prince Alfred, to remember that 'stiffness' was not requisite in her house 'This,' she said, 'applies especially to my excellent Brown, who ought to be treated by all of you, as he is by others, differently to the more ordinary servants (tho they should be treated with great friendliness).'

The Queen told Prince Arthur much else besides. His governor, Sir Howard Elphinstone, who had won a Victoria Cross at Sebastopol, was bombarded with instructions on all manner of points on the boy's upbringing. Notes, either delivered by a servant or screwed like billets-doux to be passed to him personally, perhaps as she went into dinner, were handed to him almost every day. The Prince was not to be allowed to mix with Eton boys of his age: the sons of courtiers could play with him if he needed companions. Eight to ten minutes were 'more than enough time for him to dress in'. 'As Prince Arthur has a little cold he had better not go out unless it clears up, and then not on the wet grass. Perhaps Major Elphinstone will take care he takes exercise at home and the rooms are kept cool as it is very mild.' 'Why did Prince Arthur not go out with his sister and brother this afternoon, and why did he come in so early?' He should 'write Mama with one M in the middle and Papa with a large P at the beginning'. Yet if the Queen wished to take the boy on an outing, the note took the form of a request rather than a command: 'May Prince Arthur go with his sister and little brother to the play with us tonight? Has he been good?'

Even when he had come of age the reprimands, instructions and admonitions continued: he must not keep his hands in his pockets; his father had hated the habit. He must not smoke too much; he must forswear racing and gambling; yachting attracted the worst kind of people and was also to be avoided; he must 'BREAK' with the higher classes. When his charge was nineteen, Elphinstone received a note to say that he looked rather poorly and should be 'dosed'. Every room at the Ranger's House, Greenwich Park, where Prince Arthur lived with his governor, his tutor and his valet, should be kept at a steady sixty degrees and 'never exceeded' - she usually stipulated fifty-six - and when its temperature rose higher than this one November day in Scotland, with the benefit of a fire in the room, she gave orders for a wash-basinful of water to be poured on the offending flames.⁸

As he had always wanted to do, Prince Arthur joined the Army, passing 'very well' in 1866 into the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, but still living in the Ranger's House in Greenwich Park, separate from the other cadets. He obtained a commission in the Royal Engineers in 1868, transferring to the Rifle Brigade the following year. A conscientious soldier, he pleased his mother by telling her that, having worked his way up 'through every grade from Lieutenant to Lieutenant-Colonel [he] should not wish to skip the rank of Colonel'.[lx] He subsequently gave her further pleasure by marrying Princess Louise of Prussia, daughter of Prince Frederick of Hohenzollern. At first she had opposed the match, disapproving of the girl's unpleasant father, as well as her ugly nose and mouth and her bad teeth: 'he should see others first.' But as soon as she saw the eighteen-year-old girl, she changed her mind. 'Had I seen "Louischen" before Arthur spoke to me of his feelings,' she wrote, 'I should not have grieved him by hesitating for a moment in giving my consent. She is a dear, sweet girl of the most amiable and charming character ... I feel sure dear Arthur could not have chosen more wisely.'⁹

Prince Arthur felt so, too. He and his wife settled down happily together at Buckingham Palace.

The life of the Queen's youngest son was far less content. Rarely complimentary about her children when they were babies, she described Prince Leopold as being 'ugly' and 'very common looking', 'very plain in face'. He was also naughty and disobedient. Would it do to 'whip him well', she had once wondered in the presence of her mother. No, the Duchess had thought: the sound of a child crying was too distressing. 'Not when you have eight, Mama,' the Queen had said. 'That wears off. You could not go through that each time one of the eight cried.'¹⁰

Prince Leopold's looks improved somewhat as he grew older and he turned out to be cleverer and more studious than his brothers, a competent linguist, a capable musician with a pleasant singing voice, and with a precocious interest in early Italian painting and English literature. But he was certainly not prepossessing as a child: he suffered from a pronounced speech defect; he was, in his mother's words, 'very absurd' and 'dreadfully awkward'; and the more the Queen showed how concerned she was about his health, the 'constant fear' she felt about it, the more difficult, argumentative and pert he became.

'I heard your musical box playing most clearly this afternoon,' she once complained.

'Impossible. My musical box never plays.'

'But I know it was yours, as there was a drum in it I recognized.'

'That shows it wasn't my musical box. There is no drum in it.'¹¹

The Queen compared Prince Leopold with her darling Arthur, who was 'so lovely & engaging, so sensible and so clever & such a very good little Child', whereas Leopold was 'quite the reverse'.¹² Admittedly he was 'very clever' '& (when amiably disposed) amusing enough'. But he was very plain and difficult, constantly asking questions, 'excessively quizzical'.¹³

When he was five years old she told the Crown Princess, 'He is tall, but holds himself worse than ever, and is ... an oddity - and not an engaging child'. 'He walks shockingly,' she added the following year, 'and is dreadfully awkward ... His manners are despairing as well as his speech - which is quite dreadful ... His French is more like Chinese than anything else; poor child, he is really very unfortunate.'¹⁴ Lady Augusta Bruce, who thought him 'a dear', had to admit that he was 'passionate and always frightfully naughty in the presence of his parents, who think him quite a Turk! ... I do not think they know how to manage him.'¹⁵

'However, it is very difficult,' Lady Augusta added, the symptoms of haemophilia having already appeared in the boy, 'for the battles are usually to avert some danger. He is perfectly restless and fearless.' He bruised himself with alarming frequency and became quite lame after falling over. 'Your poor little namesake is again laid up with a bad knee from a fall - wh appeared to be of no consequence,' the Queen had written to the King of the Belgians not long after the boy's third birthday. 'It is very sad for the poor Child - for really I fear he will never be able to enter any active service. This unfortunate defect ... is often not outgrown - & no remedy or medicine does it any good. '¹⁶

Before accepting the seriousness of her son's condition the Queen had been less sympathetic than irritated by his frailties and behaviour. But once she understood how incapacitating and dangerous the illness was, her attitude had changed. 'Poor Child,' she had told King Leopold, 'he is so very studious & so very clever but always meeting with accidents, which with another child would not be mentioned even, but which from the peculiar constitution of his blood vessels, which have no adhesiveness, become dreadful. He has now a bump on his forehead which is as big as a nut ... Unfortunately all the "faculty" say nothing whatever can be done for it ... He is very patient. '¹⁷

After suffering a coughing fit which made his nose bleed alarmingly, it was decided that he should be sent abroad to a warmer climate for a while; and so, on 2 November 1861, he left for France from Windsor where, on the Castle steps, he said goodbye to his 'dear Papa' whom he was never to see again. Upon his return his mother made it clear that, while he could never hope to replace him in her affections, he was to do what he could to take his father's place. She hoped that, if he was spared, he might grow up to 'resemble his precious father in character - in many of the qualities at least and ... [might] go on with His work'.¹⁸

In order to ensure that he was, indeed, spared to fulfil this destiny, the Queen watched over the child, now eight years old, as diligently as she urged Elphinstone to watch over Prince Arthur. After an attack of internal bleeding brought on, so she thought, by riding, he was forbidden to ride again 'except at a foot's pace'; he was not to play games with other boys in which he might get hurt; he was not to be removed from the watchful eye of his mother and 'from his own Home'. He was to be entrusted to the care of a Highland servant, John Brown's brother, Archibald, who could carry him about when he could not walk, and of a governor, a young officer in the Royal Horse Artillery, Walter George Stirling, who, his mother hoped, would 'take real care of our poor dear Boy'.¹⁹

Prince Leopold liked Stirling. So did the Queen at first. But he did not get on well with the Highlanders, particularly not with Archie Brown; and in the summer of 1866 she found an excuse for getting rid of him, much to the Highlanders' satisfaction. Stirling, she declared, was 'unsuited' to his post. 'He has not,' she told Major Elphinstone, 'enlarged views or knowledge enough to lead and develop so clever a boy as Leopd - without a father.'²⁰

Leopold was greatly distressed and angry with his mother. There was an embarrassing scene one day at luncheon when the thirteen-year-old boy appeared with 'a great gold ring on his finger. His mother asked him what it was and who had given it to him. 'Someone,' he replied. Pressed, he 'grew very red & said "Mr Stirling"'.

'I cannot say how I miss you,' he wrote to Stirling. 'I always expect to see you coming in the morning as you always did, and as I was carried down to breakfast Louise and I missed you looking over the banister at the top of the staircase at us.'²¹

Having lost the company of Stirling, Leopold was also forbidden to spend so much time with his sister, Louise, who also disliked the 'dreadful Scotch servants', as her brother called them. 'I am no more allowed to stop with Louise as I used to do,' he told Stirling in one of several letters which he contrived to have delivered to him without the Queen's knowing. 'And this morning I got a message that I was never to ask anybody to come into the railway carriage in going to Scotland without first getting Mamma's permission.'

'Poor little fellow,' Princess Louise wrote to a friend, 'he is never allowed to come to me now, it is a great grief to us both. He said to me one day, "Lucy, I don't know what would happen to me if you ever went away, all would be over for me then."'²²

Fortunately the boy's new tutor, the Revd Robinson Duckworth, a Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, was kind and understanding with his charge. He also took the trouble to be charming to the Queen, who was struck by both his manner and his good looks, and to establish satisfactory relations with the Highlanders, as his predecessor had failed to do.

Soon after Duckworth's appointment, Prince Leopold fell dangerously ill, bleeding from the bowel, and his mother sat anxiously by his bedside, fearing that he would die. When he began slowly to recover and the 'dear child' was given back to her 'from the brink of the grave', his mother decided that he must henceforth be the 'chief object' of her life, and that he and Princess Beatrice and their mother would be 'three inseparables'. The destiny of the two children was to be of help to her in her work. This was employment which Leopold at least seemed likely to become well qualified to do. 'He learns besides French and German, Latin, Greek and Italian,' the Queen told their eldest sister; 'is very fond of music and drawing, takes much interest in politics - in short in everything. His mind and head are far the most like of any of the boys to his dear Father.'²³

This plan for his future was far from what Prince Leopold wanted. The thought of spending the rest of his life cooped up at Windsor and Osborne and that 'horrid', 'detestable', 'more vile and most abominable' place, Balmoral, appalled him, particularly as he would for so much of the time be in the hands of the detested Browns. 'I am rather in the grumps just now about everything,' he told Stirling in September 1868 when he was fifteen. 'The way in which I am treated is sometimes too bad (not Mr Duckworth, of course not, he is only too kind to me) but other people. Besides that "J.B." is fearfully insolent to me, so is his brother; hitting me in the face with spoons for fun, etc - you may laugh at me for all this; but you know I am so sensitive, I know you will feel for me.'²⁴

'I am altogether very low about myself,' he wrote from Osborne in another letter to Stirling after a recurrence of his terribly painful illness in February 1870, 'as no sooner had I recovered from my last tedious illness ... than here I am laid up again ... This life here is becoming daily more odious & intolerable. Every inch of liberty is taken away from one & one is watched, and everything one says or does is reported.' He greatly feared, he added, that Mr Duckworth was going to be treated in the same way as Stirling himself had been, that his dismissal was soon to be engineered by the dreadful Browns who added so much to the misery of a life which was already 'so empty and idiotic' that he confessed to contemplating suicide.

'That devil Archie,' he told his new tutor, Robert Hawthorn Collins, after Duckworth's foretold departure, 'he does nothing, but jeer at, & be impertinent to me everyday, & in the night he won't do anything for me ... not even give me my chamberpot, & he is so insolent before the other servants, the infernal blackguard. I could tear him limb from limb I loathe him so.'²⁵

'H.M. has grown more tyrannical over me & indeed over everybody than ever,' the Prince added in a letter the following year. 'I must say that I am getting heartily tired of my bondage & am looking forward to the day when I shall be able to burst the bars of my iron cage & fly away for ever.'²⁶

He was eighteen now and saw a means of escape in persuading his mother to allow him to go to Oxford, writing her a skilful letter to point out the advantages of a university education, emphasizing that he wanted to follow in 'dear Papa's footsteps as much as possible' and that 'to meet with such companions of my own age as would be carefully selected would tend to take away that shyness of manner, & general dullness of spirit in conversation' of which she 'so naturally & so much' complained.

The Queen initially opposed this suggestion which she was greatly annoyed to discover had been discussed by others 'behind [her] back' before being proposed to her. His dear father would certainly have disapproved of the idea, she told the boy; and she herself had her own objections to both Oxford and Cambridge. St Andrews might have been considered but, of course, there could be no question of his going into residence anywhere. 'You fancy,' she told him, 'you are stronger than you really are.'

Eventually, however, she was persuaded or, as she put it, 'forced' to give way and to allow Prince Leopold to study at Oxford, hedging her consent about with numerous conditions, on the clear understanding that it was 'merely for study & not for amusement', that Leopold would return to Windsor at weekends when the Queen was there, go with her to Osborne at Easter and to Balmoral in May, even though this would mean missing most of the summer term, and that he realized how inconvenient it would be for her 'not having a grown up Child in the House in case of Visitors'.²⁷ Leopold's happiness at Oxford was marred by what he called the 'bullying letters & telegrams' which he received from 'Home, sweet home', by the necessity of returning so frequently to 'headquarters' where, on one occasion at least, he and his mother had a 'screaming row', and by the strict limitations placed upon his activities at Oxford so that he should not fall prey to temptation as his two eldest brothers had both done. He was limited in the number of men he could have to dinner and was forbidden to 'have any at all of the softer sex', which, as he told Stirling, 'is a great pity, as there are such awfully pretty girls here unmarried as well as married, & you know I am always a great admirer, & more than that, of fair females.'

He did, however, contrive to fall in love with one of the daughters of the Dean of Christ Church, the Revd Henry Liddell; and this made the wrench of leaving Oxford for Windsor, Osborne or the detested Balmoral all the more unpleasant. At Oxford he was, so Liddell's friend, Charles Dodgson, who wrote under the name of Lewis Carroll, said,' a universal favourite', whereas when required to be at 'headquarters' he was repressed and exasperated by his mother's anxious watching over him, her reluctance to allow him to do any public duties outside the house, her insistence that he must reconcile himself to remaining at home as a kind of private secretary.

After he came of age in April 1874, his mother, while continuing to fret and fuss about his health, allowed his life to become rather less restricted. Archie Brown was given other duties; the companionable and amusing Alick Yorke was appointed his equerry, and he was delighted to be able to tell his tutor, Robert Collins: 'Eliza found a servant for me, a good one! An Englishman!!! Oh Ye Gods! What a marvel!' After her son had recovered from an almost fatal attack of typhoid fever, the Queen even allowed him to rent a country house with Mr and Mrs Collins, Boyton Manor in Wiltshire, though she expressed her deep regret that he rejected the home that she had done all she could to make comfortable for him and declared that if he had talked about his plan of taking Boyton Manor to his brothers or sisters before discussing it with her, she would 'never forgive it'.²⁸

She still maintained that, because of his poor health, he must have no thoughts of a public role in life; and, when grudgingly granted permission to attend some public function, she took it upon herself to supervise the details. For instance, upon his accepting an invitation to become a Freeman of the City of London, she first of all tried to have the ceremony performed at Windsor, then instructed the Lord Mayor that 'everything should go thro' her'. And, upon his being appointed a Younger Brother of Trinity House, she not only told him not to stand too long during the ceremony but also directed him to wear Highland dress rather than the Trinity House uniform. Indeed, he was required to consult her about the clothes to be worn on all public occasions.²⁹

Relations between the anxious mother and the wilful son grew progressively worse. Concerned about his moral as well as his physical well-being, she told him that he must not go to Cowes during the Regatta 'to lounge about or pay visits to fashionable ladies or indeed get familiar with people'. He must also, she insisted, be more polite and sociable when at Balmoral, visit the tenants more often, be more respectful to his mother and less quarrelsome with Beatrice.

In his determination to spend his time more profitably, to take on public responsibilities concerned with health, social issues, and the arts, he consulted Lord Beaconsfield. But Beaconsfield was not forthcoming and, after consulting the Queen, proposed that the Prince should be his mother's confidential assistant in her dealings with foreign affairs, in effect, that he should carry on with the work he was already doing.

Of course I am very glad (& it interests me exceedingly) to see all the despatches which the Queen receives & to make 'precis' or analyses of them for the Queen, as I have been doing lately [Prince Leopold replied to Beaconsfield]. But then all this is done, & much better done, by her Private Secretary, & I feel that the Queen only gives me these things to do to keep me employed, & not because it is of any necessity to her ... Were my relations with the Queen more cordial, or could I ever hope that they might become more cordial, I should not be so very anxious as I am; but, as I fear, you are only too well aware, we are not on such terms as we ought to be, & we are never on such good terms as when we are absent from one another.30

As he might have expected, the Prince's complaint to Lord Beaconsfield was quite ineffective and, when his mother heard of it, it merely served to make her more angry with him than ever and, as she put it, 'grieved to see you still think you can act behind my back'. When the Prince told Beaconsfield that the work he was given to do interested him, he was quite evidently speaking the truth; and, as relations between him and his mother gradually improved, she was grateful for his help. She allowed him to make use of a Cabinet key so that he could unlock boxes to consult confidential papers. 'Dizzy' had given him the key, his father's key, he told a friend: his brother, the Prince of Wales, was not allowed to have one.

The Queen's secretarial staff, however, were far from pleased that Prince Leopold should have been thus favoured, for they found him to be the highest of high Tories, opinionated, interfering and indiscreet, and they were thankful when in May 1878, to his mother's shocked concern, he told her, in a letter which Ponsonby described as 'respectful and dutiful in expression', that he declined to make the usual spring visit to Balmoral. Instead, he went to Paris for a fortnight.

On a subsequent visit to the Continent, Prince Leopold met Princess Helen of Waldeck-Pyrmont whom he was to marry.

He had been thinking of marriage for some time. Having fallen in love with the beautiful Alma, Countess of Breadalbane, he had hoped to marry the granddaughter and sole heiress of the third Viscount Maynard, who had been bequeathed estates worth £20,000 a year; but nothing came of this and soon afterwards she married Lord Brooke, heir to the earldom of Warwick. Nor did anything come of a proposed marriage to Mary Baring, daughter of Lord Ashburton, who had given him some encouragement to believe that she might accept his offer, but who soon decided that she was too young at nineteen to settle down, particularly with a young man who was so often ill.³¹

The Prince had then considered Princess Caroline Matilda of Schles-wig-Holstein; but although the Queen liked her and was prepared to accept the girl to 'prevent a bad mistake being made' by his falling in love with someone less suitable, the girl's family raised objections, declaring that, before his death, her father had written a letter prohibiting the match.³²

At last the Prince found a suitable bride in Princess Helen of Waldeck-Pyrmont. The Queen repeated her doubts that Leopold's health was up to marriage with any girl, at the same time expressing 'shock' at having to lose her son to a wife; yet, if he was determined to marry, she had to agree that, from all she had heard of her, Princess Helen was a good choice, even though the girl was reputed to be clever, perhaps too clever.³³ When her family arrived in England - with eighty trunks of luggage -for the wedding, the Queen was much taken with the bride whom she now saw for the first time. 'Helen is tall and "elancee"', she wrote in her journal, 'with a fine figure, rich colour, very dark hair, dark brown, deep-set eyes & a sweet smile. She has a charming, friendly manner & is very affectionate & warm hearted.'³⁴

Even so, the thought of Prince Leopold's marrying was 'terrible'. He had recently slipped on a piece of orange peel, hurting his knee so badly that he had to hobble about with a stick, and on the wedding day he was 'lame and shaky'. It was 'a sad exhibition', she told the Crown Princess, 'and I fear everyone must be shocked at it and blame me! I pity her but she seems only to think of him with love and affection.'³⁵

She certainly, like the Duke of Edinburgh's wife, pleased her mother-in-law by not being nervous in her presence. Indeed, she stood less in awe of the Queen than almost everyone else in the family. Soon after her marriage - at which the Queen appeared, for the first time in over forty years, wearing her white wedding lace over her black dress - she stormed into her mother-in-law's room to complain that a maid had been chosen for her without her being consulted in the matter. She wished, she said, to make her own appointments. After she had gone the Queen commented that she could do nothing with her; 'but unfortunately in this case she is quite right. It is what I should have done myself.'

To the astonishment of the Queen, who had doubted her son's ability to have children, her daughter-in-law became pregnant soon after the marriage and gave birth to a healthy daughter. The following spring the child's father, by then created Duke of Albany, decided to go to the south of France for the sake of his health, thinking, as his mother put it, that he required 'a little change and warmth'. 'But he is going alone,' she added, 'as Helen's health does not allow her to travel just now. I think it rather a pity that he should leave her.' And it was here at Cannes that, having fallen down on the tiled floor of a club house, he died in March 1884.³⁶

The Queen was 'stunned, bewildered and wretched... utterly crushed' by the loss of one who, she now decided, had been the 'dearest' of her 'dear sons'. 'Oh! what grief,' she wrote. 'How dear he was to me, how I watched over him ... He was such a charming companion, the "Child of the House" ... and that poor loving young wife ... Too, too dreadful! But we must bow to God's will and believe that it is surely for the best. The poor dear boy's life had been a very tried one.' His body was brought back to Windsor to be buried in St George's Chapel. His mother, blind as usual to the misdemeanours past and present of her favoured Highlanders, decreed that when the coffin was taken to the Chapel, Archie Brown should be present because he had, so she said, been such a devoted servant to the Prince in his lifetime.³⁷

Less than four months later the Duchess gave birth to another child, a boy. This baby, the second Duke of Albany, was the Queen's thirty-second grandchild. She was to have six more. Four of these were the children of Princess Beatrice.

As the youngest daughter of the family, and a precocious and endearing child, Princess Beatrice had always been more indulged than her sisters. She had been allowed to behave in a way that would have been considered reprehensible in them. When told not to help herself to some delicacy on the table which would not have been 'good for Baby', she took it anyway with the characteristic comment, 'But she likes it, my dear.'³⁸ And when reproached, aged four, for being naughty she carelessly agreed that she had been: 'I was very naughty last night. I would not speak to Papa, but it doesn't signify much.'³⁹

After the birth of Prince Leopold the Queen had told Sir James Clark that she thought that if she had yet another child 'she would sink under it'. Clark had thought that this was not improbable, though it was her mind that would give way, not her body.[lxi]⁴⁰ After the birth of Princess Beatrice she had soon regained her spirits, however. 'I have felt better and stronger this time than I have ever done before,' she wrote in her journal. She had quite thrown off her recent unhappiness when she had felt obliged to ask Prince Albert to support her in her dealings with their other children and not to scold her in front of them. 'I was simply rewarded and forgot all I had gone through when I heard dearest Albert say, "It is a fine child, and a girl!'"⁴¹

As the child grew up, her mother became even more reluctant to part with her than she had been to part with Princess Alice and Princess Helena. She made it quite clear that marriage would be severely frowned upon. She intended, so she admitted herself, to keep Beatrice 'young and childlike' for as long as possible, since she 'could not live without her'. This was for 'Baby's' good as well as for her own comfort. Besides, the shy girl had no wish to marry; nor had she ever had. When as a child she had watched Frith painting his picture of her eldest brother's wedding, the painter had asked her if she would have liked to have been one of his bridesmaids. 'No,' she replied much to her mother's satisfaction, 'I don't like weddings at all. I shall never be married. I shall stay with mother.'⁴²

'I may truly and honestly say,' the Queen told the girl's eldest sister, 'I never saw so amiable, gentle, and thoroughly contented a child as she is. She has the sweetest temper imaginable and is very useful and handy ... She is my constant companion and hope and trust will never leave me while I live. I do not intend she should ever go out as her sisters did (which was a mistake) but let her stay (except of course occasionally going to theatres) as much as she can with me.'⁴³

Years later the Queen still had the 'most violent dislike' of her 'precious Baby' marrying, and was still thanking God 'for such a devoted child who was really almost as much like a sister as a daughter'; and when Princess Beatrice's brother, Prince Leopold, died she was all the more indispensable. There must still be no question of marriage. 'I hate weddings,' the Queen said. 'They are melancholy things and cause the happiest beings such trials with them, bad health etc. etc.'⁴⁴

Henry Ponsonby was reprimanded for having mentioned someone else's marriage at dinner: there must be no talk of such a thing in Princess Beatrice's presence.⁴⁵ Marriage, she often contended, was 'rarely' a source of 'real happiness'. She 'could never be enthusiastic about any marriage'. Indeed, she would go further: 'I hate marriages, especially of my daughters ... I detest them beyond words ... I often wonder,' she continued with increasing disregard for her grammar, 'that any mother can bear of giving up your own child, from whom all has been so carefully kept and guarded - to a stranger to do unto her as he likes is to me the most torturing thought in the world.'⁴⁶

When she heard that Princess Beatrice had not only changed her mind about marrying but had actually chosen a man she wished to make her husband, the Queen flatly declined to talk about it. For weeks on end she refused to speak to her daughter, communicating with her by notes pushed across the breakfast table. Eventually, in 1885, she consented to the marriage, but only on the understanding that the man, Prince Henry of Battenberg, would come to live at Court, since it would have been 'quite out of the question for Beatrice to have left home. Indeed, she would surely 'never have wished it herself, knowing well how impossible it was for her to leave her mother'. After all, in twenty-two years, she had 'only been absent for 10 days once'.⁴⁷

Even though her daughter was to remain at home, the Queen dreaded the approach of the wedding day when she would have to give up her 'own sweet, unspoilt, innocent lily and child' into the hands of another. She hoped and prayed there would be 'no results' for some time. At least she was thankful to say that there was 'no kissing (etc) which Beatrice dislikes' and which, so the Queen said, used to try her so 'with dear Fritz'. She had always considered there was 'gt want of propriety and delicacy ... in treating your Bridegroom as tho (except in one point) -he were your Husband'. Young people were unfortunately 'getting vy American in their lives and ways'.'⁴⁸

The wedding day itself, the Queen expected, would be 'a gt trial' for her. But, in the event, the ceremony, held in the church near Osborne at Whippingham - the first time a royal bride had been married in a parish church in England - was, she thought, 'very touching'.

'I stood very close to my dear child, who looked very sweet, pure and calm,' the Queen wrote in her journal. 'Though I stood for the ninth time near a child and for the fifth time near a daughter, at the altar, I think I never felt more deeply than I did on this occasion ... When the blessing had been given, I tenderly embraced my darling "Baby".'⁴⁹

According to Labouchere's weekly journal, Truth, the ceremony was, however, not so pleasantly moving as the Queen's journal suggests. The Queen herself looked 'exceedingly cross', the Prince of Wales 'ill at ease and out of sorts'; the bridesmaids were remarkable for a 'decided absence of beauty'; the Archbishop of Canterbury gave a tedious address which made the Queen 'tap her foot in a very ominous way' and the Prince of Wales 'fidgety'; the Grand Duke of Hesse looked 'old and haggard', the Duke of Edinburgh 'even more sour and supercilious than usual', while his Duchess's 'sullen expression which [had] become habitual... appeared to be accentuated for the occasion'. 'Princess Louise,' the report concluded, 'looked well but has a very flighty manner. Lord Lome was in tartans, but certainly looked very common ... Prince George of Wales seemed thoroughly well pleased with himself. He is a very ordinary looking lad but apparently has more go about him than his brother.'⁵⁰

When the service was over and Princess Beatrice left for a villa a few miles away at Ryde for a honeymoon lasting a bare two days, it was 'horrid' for the Queen to have to say goodbye to her: it was like 'a punishment or a necessary execution'. She put her fingers in her ears to shut out the noise of the band. She then burst into tears and later commented, 'I agree with the Mohammedans that duty towards one's Parents goes before every other but that is not taught as part of religion in Europe.'⁵¹

Fortunately, the Queen grew fond of Prince Henry: he was 'so full of consideration for her' and became like a 'bright sunbeam' in the house, always so cheerful and helpful, as much at ease in her presence as she was in his; and, although there were in time to be four 'results' of his marriage to Princess Beatrice, the Queen was pleased to have these grandchildren always about the house.

Chapter 54 THE GRANDCHILDREN

'And there sat Grandmama not idol-like at all, not a bit frightening, smiling a kind smile, almost as shy as us children.'

In her later years the Queen much enjoyed the company of young children. One of her ladies, Marie Mallet, described how delighted she appeared to be when her fetching little son, Victor Mallet, was presented to her, and pleased in particular by the interest he took in a portrait by Landseer of Eos, Prince Albert's favourite greyhound. The boy himself, who greeted her with a confident 'Good morning, Queen', was 'charmed at once by her beaming smile and great gentleness of voice and manner', and highly pleased with a miniature landau drawn by a pair of grey horses which she gave him as a present. On a later occasion she 'laughed till she cried' when the boy, by then three years old, having made a very low bow on entering the room, went up to kiss her hand, produced a little black and white toy pig and announced, 'Look at this pig. I have brought it all the way from London to see you. '¹

Although she never outgrew her distaste for the whole concept and process of childbirth, the Queen endeavoured when she could to be present at the birth of her grandchildren, holding the hands of the mothers-to-be, murmuring words of sympathy and encouragement, and stroking their arms for hours on end. She nursed the babies on her knee when they were ill; and when they were a little older she allowed them into her room to play, preferably one at a time. 'Dear little things,' she said. 'I like to see them so at home with me.' She loved 'to hear their little feet & merry voices' when they came to stay with her. 'I must tell you how I enjoyed those 10 quiet days with your beloved ones!' she wrote after one such visit at Osborne in 1893. 'I don't know when I felt happier during the past few years.'

She had urged her daughters not to have too many children too soon. 'It is very sad,' she had told her eldest daughter, to become pregnant too often since it was 'ruin to the looks of a young woman'. Yet grandchildren, then great grandchildren, had nevertheless been produced at an astonishing rate.

When the Prince of Wales's fourth child was born in July 1868, the Queen wrote to her eldest daughter, 'The baby - a mere little red lump - was all I saw; & I fear the seventh grand-daughter & fourteenth grandchild becomes a very uninteresting thing - for it seems to me to go on like the rabbits in Windsor Park! The present large family is very far from enjoyable or good for me.' 'Unlike many people,' she told the Dean of Windsor, 'the Queen does not rejoice greatly at these constant additions to her family.'² In the end, however, she became reconciled to the process. On receiving in November 1896 a telegram which had arrived at Balmoral announcing the birth of twins to her granddaughter, Princess Margaret of Hesse, the eighth child of the Emperor Frederick, she 'laughed very much and [was] rather amused at the list of her great grandchildren being added to in such a rapid manner'.³

She was quite ready to condemn the behaviour of these descendants when in one of her cantankerous moods; and then the belief that they were 'sweet, dear, merry simple things' was quite forgotten. The Prince of Wales's sons, for example, were ill-bred and ill-trained when they were small, 'as wild as hawks'.⁴ She 'could not fancy them at all'. Yet she grew to love them both; and they to revere her. The elder son of the younger of the two, the future Duke of Windsor, known in the family as David, well remembered being taken as a small boy to see her:

Such was the majesty that surrounded Queen Victoria, that she was regarded almost as a divinity of whom even her own family stood in awe. However, to us children she was 'Gangan' ... She wore a white tulle cap, black satin dress and shiny black boots with elastic sides. What fascinated me most about 'Gangan' was her habit of taking breakfast in little revolving huts mounted on turntables so that they could be faced away from the wind. If the weather was fine, a small low-slung carriage ... would be at the front door. In this she would ride to one or other of the shelters where her Indian servants would be waiting with her wheel-chair. They would serve her breakfast, which always began with a bowl of steaming hot porridge. Later she would call for her Private Secretary and begin the business of the day.

My great-grandmother always seemed to be surrounded by members of her immense family. She had nine children, forty grandchildren, numerous great-grandchildren [she was survived by thirty-seven] and countless nephews, nieces, and cousins by marriage...

From the time I learned to walk, one of my strongest recollections of these visits to 'Gangan' was of my being pushed forward to say 'how do you do' to Uncle Ernie or Aunt Louischen. Their greeting would be affectionate, but more often than not the words, though in fluent English, would be pronounced in the guttural accents of their mother tongue.5

The Queen was particularly fond of this boy, David, a 'most attractive little boy, and so forward and clever'. 'He always tries at luncheon time to pull me up out of my chair,' she wrote in her journal, 'saying "Get up, Gangan", and then to one of the Indian servants, "Man pull it", which makes us laugh very much.' Even so, both he and his brother, Albert, the future King George VI, were both frightened of their great grandmother when she was in a less playful mood and then they would often burst into tears and this would annoy her and she would ask petulantly what she had done wrong.⁶

Compared with what Henry Ponsonby called the peremptory manner in which she had treated her children, the indulgence generally shown to her grandchildren and great-grandchildren was extraordinary. One of her eldest daughter's sons once released a pet crocodile under her writing desk, an antic which his mother and her siblings would never have dared to perpetrate. Other children were permitted to build walls round her feet with empty dispatch boxes; and they remembered going for rides with her in her carriage and reducing her and themselves to helpless laughter. Her granddaughter, Margaret, the Duke of Connaught's child, was particularly naughty but she was usually forgiven because she was so 'funny'. The Queen was also amused rather than cross when Princess Beatrice's Alexander, known as 'Drino', wrote to her from Wellington College to beg her to send him some more pocket money. This she declined to do, telling the boy that he must learn to keep within his allowance. He replied to say she need not bother about the matter any more as he had sold her letter of refusal for thirty shillings.⁷

The children were not allowed to go too far, however; and, once they were old enough to sense her regal authority, they felt a certain awe in approaching her, just as she felt shy in their presence until she grew accustomed to their company, occasionally giggling apprehensively, giving diffident little shrugs of her shoulders when asking them questions. The Duke of Edinburgh's daughter, Princess Marie, known as 'Missy', and one day to be Queen of Rumania, recalled the walk to her room down hushed corridors in which grown-ups spoke in whispers.[lxii] And then the Queen's door opened 'and there sat Grandmama not idol-like at all, not a bit frightening, smiling a kind smile [the 'sweetest, most entrancing smile' which the composer and feminist, Ethel Smyth, had 'ever seen'] almost as shy as us children.'

Like the Queen's other grandchildren, however, Princess Marie knew that her grandmother could be strict as well as kind and shy. Princess Beatrice's daughter, Princess Victoria Eugenie, known as Ena, the future Queen of Spain, was told to be quiet in church at the Duke of York's wedding: nobody, she was told, talked in church. When the Archbishop began to read the service, however, Princess Ena called out 'But, Mummy, that man is talking.' On returning to Buckingham Palace the Queen severely told the child not to be pert. She had reason to be cross on other occasions with Princess Ena whose memories of her grandmother were accordingly less fond than those of her cousins, though she spoke of her 'lovely girlish voice and silver laugh'.

She said [to Sir Harold Nicolson] that Queen Victoria never understood children and asked them so many questions that they became confused. She had a horrible bag of gold and coral out of which she would take sovereigns and give them to them. When it was too snowy at Balmoral to go out to Crathie Church, she would give them Bible talks in her room. That was a great ordeal, as she always lost her temper with their stupidity ... No liberties were permitted. The Battenberg children, being resident family, were always given dull nursery meals - beef, mutton and milk puddings - but visiting children were allowed eclairs and ices. Once Princess Ena, in indignation at this, said as her grace, 'Thank God for my dull dinner.' Queen Victoria was enraged at this and punished her.8

This, however, was a rare occurrence. She was seldom so cross with any of her grandchildren, most of whom she loved dearly. When Princess Ena was badly injured while riding her pony and Dr Reid felt obliged to tell her grandmother of the gravity of her case, the Queen said, 'I love these darling children so, almost as much as their parents.'

She took the greatest interest in their development and in that of all their many cousins; and it would have been too much to expect of her character that she should not require them to come to see her to subject them to cross-examination so as to elicit their qualities and attainments, as it would have been to expect that she should refrain from giving their parents advice about their upbringing and marriages. It was certainly predictable, for example, that she should tell the Princess of Wales that her sons should be kept 'apart from the society of fashionable and fast people', and advance the decided opinion that Princess Alice's daughter, Elizabeth, known as Ella, ought to be strongly discouraged from marrying the Grand Duke Serge, Tsar Alexander Ill's younger brother. She would never stand the climate for one thing; and, for another, Ella would be quite lost to her grandmother because, so the Queen said, 'Russia is our real enemy and totally antagonistic to England.'⁹

When her grandchildren were small the Queen delighted in arranging treats for them; and it became customary for her to give them all a gold watch on their tenth birthday.¹⁰ She would have performing bears and Punch and Judy men brought to Windsor and Osborne for them; and once Buffalo Bill and his troupe came to put on their show below the East Terrace at Windsor; another day a man with a barrel organ and a monkey was summoned to the quadrangle for Princess Ena; and 'the Queen was much amused when the monkey climbed the portico and tried to find a way into the Castle through the dining room windows'.¹¹

Once they had succeeded in overcoming the Queen's shyness as well as their own, her grandchildren clearly enjoyed their visits to Windsor and the company of their grandmother, her odd comments and forthright, unpredictable views. 'Grandmama so kind and dear as usual,' Princess Victoria of Prussia told her mother, describing in her letters home the summer days, the green grass in the Park - 'no one knows what grass is until they come to England' - and the rhododendrons - 'like a dream' - the Queen making a speech, 'so well and without hesitation', as she presented new colours to a regiment in the courtyard, the drives to Frogmore and the picnic teas with the nurses in their long, rustling dresses running after children down the slopes, the Queen working so conscientiously at her papers in the shade of an immense cedar tree, the games of tennis on the courts below the East Terrace, the Eton boys rowing on the river in the evening and Uncle Bertie, charming and pleasingly raffish, coming to dinner and talking of a different world.¹²

Chapter 55 WOULD-BE ASSASSINS

As the Queen's carriage drove out of Windsor station yard on the late afternoon of 2 March 1882, she heard what she took to be an engine letting off steam. Then she saw people running about in all directions and a man being hustled away as two Eton boys hit him on the head and shoulders with their umbrellas. A superintendent of the Windsor police ran towards them and snatched a revolver from the man's hand. Brown was not as quick as usual in jumping down from his seat at the back of the carriage; and later the Queen described him as being 'greatly perturbed'.¹

The would-be assassin, who was driven off in a cab to the police station by the superintendent, was, so the Queen was sorry to learn, a Scotsman. His name was Roderick Maclean and he fancied himself as a poet. When he was searched the police found an example of his work, dedicated to the Queen, together with a letter from Lady Biddulph, the Master of the Household's wife, informing him that Her Majesty did not accept manuscript poetry. It was also discovered that Maclean, after suffering a serious head injury, had spent fifteen years in a lunatic asylum from which he had not long since been discharged. At his trial on a charge of High Treason at Reading Assizes, his defence counsel maintained that no one could doubt that he was still insane. This contention was supported by several medical experts. The Queen, however, would have none of it; and when Maclean was found not guilty of attempting to murder Her Majesty 'on grounds of insanity', the verdict outraged her common sense. How, she protested, could the man be found not guilty of attempted murder when numerous witnesses had actually seen him attempt it? It that was the law, she said, the law must be changed. And so it was: the following year an Act was passed providing for the new formula, 'guilty but insane'. Meanwhile, the two Etonians who had belaboured Maclean with their umbrellas were both promised a commission in the Guards.²

This was by no means the first attempt which had been made on the Queen's life. Four months after her marriage, when she had been three months pregnant with the Princess Royal, she had been driving up Constitution Hill from Buckingham Palace in an open carriage with Prince Albert one evening on their way to see her mother, who had not long since moved to Belgrave Square. The carriage was suddenly brought to a halt by a loud bang. 'My God! Don't be alarmed!' exclaimed the Prince, throwing his arms around his wife who was so little alarmed that she laughed at his agitation. She then noticed 'a little man on the footpath with his arms folded over his breast, a pistol in each hand', looking 'so affected and theatrical' that the Prince, by his own account, was 'quite amused'. The Queen saw the man take aim for a second time before the Prince pushed her head down as a bullet flew over it. The man was seized by John William Millais, a gentleman from Jersey, whose eleven-year-old son, John Everett Millais, a pupil at Henry Sass's school of drawing in Bloomsbury, had just raised his cap to Her Majesty.³

Mr Millais had no trouble in holding the assailant until the Queen's attendants rushed towards them as a gathering crowd began to shout 'Kill him! Kill him!' The Queen, still outwardly calm though now much alarmed, was driven up the Hill. 'We arrived safely at Aunt Kent's,' the Prince recorded. 'From thence we took a short drive through the Park, partly to give Victoria a little air, and partly to show the public we had not ... lost all confidence in them.'⁴

The assailant, 'an impudent, horrid little vermin of a man', as Lord Melbourne described him, was a frail, rather simple-minded youth named Edward Oxford who lived in decrepit lodgings which were found to contain not only numerous bulletins issued by some revolutionary society, but also - so unfounded and improbable rumours had it - letters from Hanover, the monogram of whose King, E. R. (Ernestus Rex, the former Duke of Cumberland) had been found on the pistols which Oxford had fired in the attack. Oxford was arraigned on a charge of High Treason and was widely expected to be hanged; but, to the annoyance of both the Queen and of Lord Normanby, the Home Secretary, who could not believe that he was insane, as well as of Baroness Lehzen who observed that there was too much method in the man's madness, Oxford was sent to a lunatic asylum where he remained for twenty-seven years until given leave to emigrate after expressing his profound contrition. On being shown the pistols by Prince Albert the Queen reflected that they 'might have finished me off '.⁵ This possibility made the poet, Elizabeth Barrett, 'very angry'. 'What,' she asked indignantly, 'is this strange popular mania for Queen shooting?'⁶

The Queen was again nearly 'finished off two years later as her carriage was driven along the Mall where a man, described by Prince Albert as 'a little, swarthy, ill-looking rascal... of the age from twenty-six to thirty, with a shabby hat and of dirty appearance', pushed forward and, pointing a pistol at the Queen, pulled the trigger. The gun, however, was either not loaded or it misfired.

That evening the Prince talked to Sir Robert Peel; and, since the Queen felt sure that the man, who had managed to slink away in the crowd, would try again - and reluctant as she was to remain under threat in Buckingham Palace until he was apprehended - it was decided that she and the Prince should drive along the same route the next day. The coachman was told to drive rather faster than usual with 'two Equerries quite close to the carriage on either side'. An excuse was made to leave behind Lady Portman, the Queen's lady-in-waiting, who had been with her the previous day. 'I must expose the lives of my gentlemen,' the Queen said. 'But I will not those of my ladies.'⁷

As she and the Prince set off on the fine afternoon of 30 May 1842, their minds, as Prince Albert put it, were 'not very easy'. Numerous policemen in plain clothes were concealed around the Palace, behind the trees and in the Park. But as the carriage rolled along at a brisk pace in the sunlight, it seemed that their presence was unnecessary. On the return journey, however, the 'ill-looking rascal' was waiting, as the Queen expected. He pointed a pistol at her. She was close enough to him to hear the click of the hammer.

The man was seized, carried off, tried and condemned to death as a traitor, a sentence which so shocked and surprised the prisoner that he fainted in the dock. The Queen described it as being 'very painful' to her, but necessary as a deterrent. A plea of insanity had been advanced in court, but, as with Edward Oxford, she felt sure that this would-be assassin, John Francis, the son of a stage carpenter, was 'not the least mad' but 'very cunning'. She consequently heard with concern that his sentence was to be commuted to transportation for life on the grounds that there was some doubt as to whether or not the man's pistol had been loaded. She was, she said, 'glad, of course', that the man's life was to be spared; but she could not help feeling that hanging was a more effective deterrent than transportation, a view apparently shared by Edward Oxford himself who was said to have remarked to a warder that if he had been hanged 'there would have been no more shooting at the Queen'.⁸

As it was, only two days after Francis's reprieve the Queen was shot at yet again. This, however, appeared to be a not very serious attempt at assassination. The assailant was a miserable-looking midget, less than four feet tall, John William Bean, whose pistol contained far more tobacco and loose paper than gunpowder. He was sentenced to a mere eighteen months' imprisonment.

Nor was the next attack on the Queen a very serious matter. This took place on 19 May 1849 when an unemployed and unbalanced Irishman, William Hamilton, who had tried to manufacture a firearm with a few bits of wood and the spout of a tea kettle, eventually borrowed a pistol from his landlady with the intention of shooting at the Queen as she drove down Constitution Hill.⁹ Since Hamilton omitted loading the gun before pointing it at the Queen and was, in any case, clearly insane, there was again no question of hanging the man who was sentenced to seven years' transportation. After this, the fourth occasion upon which the Queen's life had been threatened since she had come to the throne, Lord Shaftesbury wrote in his diary, 'The profligate George IV passed through a life of selfishness and sin without a single proved attempt to take it. This mild and virtuous young woman has, four times already, been exposed to imminent peril.'¹⁰

Alarmed as she had been by Hamilton, the Queen was far more upset as well as injured and affronted the following year by 'a very inconceivable attack' in July while she was on her way to visit her uncle Adolphus who was gravely ill at Cambridge House. In the carriage with her were Princess Alice, the Prince of Wales, Prince Alfred and one of the Queen's favourite ladies-in-waiting, Fanny Jocelyn. Her escort was a single equerry who became separated from the carriage as it squeezed through a narrow archway. On its emergence a pale, fair-haired young man whom the Queen had noticed before walking in the Park stepped forward from the crowd and hit the Queen a vicious blow over the head with the brass end of a stick which momentarily stunned her. The Prince of Wales, then nine years old, blushed a deep red; Fanny Jocelyn, having attended to the Queen, burst into tears; while the Queen herself struggled to her feet, calling out 'I am not hurt' to the people who were roughly manhandling her assailant, Robert Pate, a young, deranged, recently retired lieutenant in the 10th Hussars whose father had been High Sheriff of Cambridge. The Queen was deeply shocked.

Certainly it is very hard & very horrid that I, a woman - a defenceless young [thirty-one-year-old] woman & surrounded by my children should be exposed to insults of this kind, and be unable to go out quietly for a drive [she wrote in her journal]. For a man to strike any woman is most brutal, & I, as well as everyone else, thinks this far worse than any attempt to shoot, which wicked as it is, is at least more comprehensible & more courageous ... I own it makes me nervous out riding, and I stare at any person coming near the carriage.11

Lord Hardwicke, a lord-in-waiting, expressed the view, however, that the attack on the Queen was almost worthwhile because of the love it elicited afterwards. It was an opinion she herself had once expressed, claiming that it was worth going through the danger for the affection and sympathy which the people displayed towards her when she survived.

Certainly after Edward Oxford's attempt on her life she was greeted with the utmost enthusiasm, with people cheering and waving handkerchiefs when she appeared at the opera a few nights later; and, after Robert Pate's assault with his walking stick, she was loudly cheered in the streets on her way to the Royal Opera House, the 'lowest of the low being most indignant'. She was cheered also inside the theatre, although her late appearance with a black eye and a bruised face interrupted an exciting skating scene. The entire audience rose to their feet to applaud her and, when the hubbub had subsided, the cast gathered on the stage to sing 'God save the Queen'. Shaken as she was by Pate's attack, she had been advised not to go to the theatre that night. But if she did not go, she had protested, it would be thought she had been seriously hurt.

'But you are hurt, Ma'am.'

'Very well, then everyone shall see how little I mind it. '¹²

Gladstone expressed the dismissive opinion that all those who had shot at or threatened the Queen were crazy. But he could not suppose that all those Irish revolutionaries committed to the establishment of an independent republic in Ireland who were known as Fenians were lunatics; and these were considered to present a threat to her life as great as, if not greater than, that of the odd maniac. In the last months of 1867, for example, after receiving an alarming report from Manchester, where three Fenians had been condemned to death after the murder of a policeman, General Grey had thought it as well to surround Balmoral with soldiers. The Queen had thought Grey's proposal 'too foolish': the Fenians would never be 'so silly' as to take her hostage; and if they did they would find her a 'very inconvenient charge'. But she had consented reluctantly to some companies of the 93rd Highlanders being sent to protect her.¹³

After all it was not to be denied that the Irish had never 'become reconciled to English rule, which they hate! So different from the Scotch who are so loyal.' She told her eldest daughter that, although it was dreadful to have to press for such a thing, 'We shall have to hang some, & it ought to have been done before.' When the 'poor men' in Manchester were hanged, however, she prayed for them.

These hangings in Manchester led to threats of further violence:¹⁴ there came a warning that eighty desperate Fenians were making for Osborne where they planned to kidnap or murder the Queen. General Grey had begged her to leave the island which was so dangerously exposed to an attack from the sea. Lord Derby also pressed her to do so. But she firmly stood her ground, suspecting that they were using the Fenians' threat to persuade her to return to Windsor or London from that restful retirement she needed. She was sorry to see General Grey 'so very much alarmed'; she would not, even so, leave Osborne. Although it made her feel 'like a state prisoner', she did agree, however, to have more soldiers and police to guard the house to which no one was to be admitted without a pass. She was pressed to have an armed bodyguard. This she refused to consider; but she was provided with one all the same.

When it transpired that reports of an attack on the island were entirely fanciful, the Queen berated her Ministers for giving credit to such 'an absurd and mad story', for allowing such 'extraordinary measures' to be taken against what now proved to be a 'disgraceful hoax'. The Fenians did pose a threat, though: one of their society shot and wounded Prince Alfred in March 1868 in Australia where he was then serving in the Royal Navy, a crime for which the assailant was executed soon afterwards. It was later suggested that when driving about London the Queen should be accompanied by the enormous, reassuring figure of the robust and aggressive Home Secretary, Sir William Harcourt. When he learned of this proposal Henry Ponsonby voiced the opinion that the sight of these two such contrasting figures riding along together would be 'most interesting. The Queen's amused response to the suggestion was 'Good gracious, no!'

Towards the end of February 1872 she was threatened once again when a youth of seventeen, named Arthur O'Connor, a great nephew of the Chartist leader, Feargus O'Connor, waved a pistol at her, demanding the release of some Fenian prisoners, as her carriage was about to pass through the Golden Gate of Buckingham Palace. 'I was trembling v. much,' she confessed, 'and a sort of shiver ran through me.'¹⁵ She grabbed hold of Lady Churchill's arm, crying, 'Save me!'

I soon recovered myself sufficiently to stand up and turn round ... All turned and asked if I was hurt, and I said, Not at all. Then ... Arthur came up [and said] they thought the man had dropped something. We looked, but could find nothing when the postillion called out, 'There it is', and looking down I then did see shining on the ground a small pistol! This filled us with horror. All were as white as sheets, Jane C. almost crying, and Leopold looking as if he were going to faint. It is to good Brown and his wonderful presence of mind that I greatly owe my safety, for he alone saw the boy rush round and followed him!16

Brown was rewarded by the Queen with a gold medal, an annuity of £25 and an expression of public thanks. At the same time Prince Arthur merely received a gold pin, much to the annoyance of the Prince of Wales who maintained that his brother had behaved just as bravely as the importunate ghillie.¹⁷ Again it was proposed that the would-be assassin, who was sentenced by a lenient judge to a year's imprisonment, was insane; and again the Queen felt sure that her assailant knew perfectly well what he was doing. She asked Gladstone to have him transported at least, so that he should not return to assault her again. In the end O'Connor himself agreed to transportation, provided he could go to a country with a climate that suited him.

His threat to the Queen occurred just two days after the service which had been held in St Paul's to give thanks for the recovery of the Prince of Wales from typhoid fever; and the nation's sympathy for Her Majesty deepened the surge of loyalty to the Crown. Long queues of people formed outside Buckingham Palace to sign their names as a mark of sympathy for the Queen's ordeal; and when Charles Dilke attempted to make a speech in Bolton critical of the monarchy his words could not be heard above voices singing 'Rule Britannia' and 'God Save the Queen'. A proposal that a Select Committee should be appointed to examine the Civil List was lost in the House of Commons by 278 votes to 2. Anything like the enthusiasm, loyalty, sympathy and affection shown her after Roderick Maclean's attempt on her life was, the Queen said, 'not to be described'. In addition to numerous letters, she received within two days well over two hundred telegrams.¹⁸

It was worth being shot at, she observed, not for the first time, 'to see how much she was loved'. Certainly the threats and rumours of threats to her life, which continued well into the 1880s, helped for a time to quieten demands that she should show herself more in public.

Chapter 56 HOLIDAYS ABROAD

While she considered that the Prince of Wales spent too much time on his foreign trips, his visits to Paris and Biarritz, the French Riviera and German and Austrian Spas, the Queen herself travelled abroad frequently and in far grander style than her son, on occasions booking an entire hotel which she filled with as many as a hundred and rarely less than sixty of her entourage of servants, Indians, Highlanders, doctors, a dentist, a nurse, a French chef, M. Ferry, and his assistants, secretaries, detectives, equerries, grooms, ladies, dressers and a Director of Continental Journeys, J. J. Kanne, as well as innumerable trunks, cases and several evidently indispensable pieces of furniture, in addition to her bed and desk, various favourite pictures and photographs, and those mementoes and trinkets, bronzes, medals, miniatures, paperweights, inkstands and penknives which normally covered the walls and tables of her crowded rooms at Windsor, Balmoral and Osborne. Also taken abroad were her horses, her ponies, 'Sultan' and 'Flora', two or three of her carriages and, in later years, her donkey. When it was diffidently suggested to her that some of her suite might possibly be dispensed with, she replied certainly not, though some of them had little if anything to do.¹ Even when travelling in England she was accompanied by an enormous suite. In 1866, when, for once, she did not pay her usual May visit to Balmoral so as to be within easy reach of her Ministers during a political crisis and went instead to stay at Cliveden, she took with her three doctors, eighty-eight other persons, twelve ponies and eight carriages. The entire assembly, together with supplies of English provisions, travelled on the Continent by her royal train at a speed of thirty-five miles an hour by day and twenty-five by night, stopping for an hour at eight o'clock in the morning so that the Queen could dress in comfort. Halts were also made at meal times and at times and places set out on a most detailed printed timetable. The timetables of Continental railways were in consequence frequently disrupted.

At the beginning of 1863, just over a year after the Prince Consort's death, the Queen had decided to visit Coburg, making as an excuse for her holiday there the state of her health. She had written to General Grey to say that she felt it 'almost a duty to do something for her wretched health & nerves, to prevent further increase of depression & exhaustion'.

God knows her own inclination would be to do nothing for her health [she had told him], as HER only wish is to see her life end SOON, but she feels that IF she is to go on, she must change the scene completely sometimes - (if it does not affect, & she hopes it does NOT, her duties) - consequently - going to Balmoral for a fortnight or 3 weeks in the Spring & to Coburg (Coburg only) in the Summer for 3 weeks - (beside visiting her dear Uncle at Brussels; which is a duty) & quite necessary.

Her Beloved Angel wld not - if he were asked & saw how weak & bowed to earth with anguish & desolation she is - ever, ever increasing - object to her making these additional moves.2

The visit, however, had not altogether been a success: she had, on that occasion, and during a subsequent holiday at Coburg, been 'overwhelmed by the number of visitors and relations' who had called to see her; and in August 1865 she had proposed going to 'some completely quiet spot in Switzerland where she [could] refuse all visitors and have complete quiet.' She preferred Switzerland to Austria 'because the Prince knew it and she would rather see nothing he had not seen'.³

'Seriously, [she had written in a memorandum to General Grey] she thinks that if she is alive (and alas! she must live on) next year she must try and do something to get a little complete rest for she feels that her nerves and her strength are getting more and more exhausted and worn... She does not wish to travel about in Switzerland or to go and see anything very fatiguing for her strength and nerves would not stand that [but] to live as simply and in as retired a way as possible ... The Queen has a real longing to try it.4

She had not been able to satisfy this longing in 1866 because of the war between Austria and Prussia; but in 1867 she wrote in her diary, 'Had a long talk with Maj. Elphinstone about a projected visit to Switzerland D. V. next year, which Dr Jenner is most anxious I should undertake for my health though it is terrible to do or see anything without my beloved Albert. Still I do long to see fine scenery, & Maj. Elphinstone is kindly going to try & find a nice place for me to go to.'⁵

She later told Elphinstone that unless she could 'find bracing air she wld not think of going to Switzerland at all'. 'Of course, hot sun and hot days she is prepared to put up with, but there must nevertheless be fresh & cold air besides.'⁶

The oppressive weather in London that summer and the next was intolerable and was made all the more so for her, since, as she explained to her eldest daughter, 'I don't perspire & am always in a dreadful, dry burning heat.' She could, she said, hardly hold her pen she was so stifled by the closeness of the atmosphere. She steeled herself to attend a garden party at Buckingham Palace where there were 'quantities of people on the lawn whom [she] had to recognize as [she] went along ... It was vy puzzling & bewildering... Felt quite exhausted & faint & I had seemed to be in a dream, so totally unsuited to the scene'.⁷

Five weeks later she was preparing to set out for what she hoped would be the cooler climate of Switzerland where Major Elphinstone had found a large pension as well as a nearby chalet just outside Lucerne, both of which had been taken over in their entirety for the Queen's stay. As the day fixed for her departure approached, however, she began to worry that Lucerne might not be cooler than Osborne which was 'really like Africa, quite intolerable': it made her wish she could 'flee to some iceberg to breathe'. Indeed, she wished she was not going abroad after all, since it was 'misery to move':⁸ she dreaded 'the whole thing a good deal'. Besides, she got 'tired very easily' and would be 'quite unequal' to see any sights. 'All Picture Galleries & Exhibitions' she felt 'obliged to give up'.⁹ In her anxiety and apprehension about 'travelling alone without dearest Papa,' so she said, she became 'very unwell' with 'diarrhoea, most violent sick headaches and violent retching'. By 5 August, the day of departure, she had recovered, however. It was, as she recorded in her journal:

A very fine morning. - Breakfast out as usual & sitting a little while with Alice. Then took leave of her and Louis & [their] 4 dear little children with regret. - At 1/4 p 12 left our dear peaceful Osborne with our 3 children [Princesses Louise and Beatrice and Prince Leopold] feeling sad at the parting with dear Alice ... Janie E [the Marchioness of Ely, Lady of the Bedchamber], the Biddulphs [Sir Thomas Biddulph and the Hon Lady Biddulph, Honorary Bedchamber Woman], Colonel Ponsonby, Sir William Jenner, Fräulein Bauer [Ottilie Bauer, Princess Beatrice's Governess] & Mr Duckworth are with us. We rowed out to the Victoria Albert and were off by 1...

As soon as we had passed the Needles, there was a groundswell & I had to go below, remaining there till we reached Cherbourg at 1/4 p. 6. How it reminded me of the past, all seemed unaltered, & yet all is so changed for me'! What used formerly to be a delight makes me low & sad now.10

Travelling across France in the Imperial Train lent to her by Napoleon III, the Queen arrived in Paris feeling uncomfortable in the 'blazing heat' and very tired since she had been unable to sleep throughout the night because the railway carriage rocked 'so dreadfully' and was so hot, despite the footbath full of ice customarily placed in the Queen's carriage at such times. She was driven from the station to the British Embassy where the Empress Eugenie called to see her. She had some 'light dinner' at six o'clock, then went on a drive through Paris, regretting the destruction of the 'picturesque old streets' and the appearance in their place of the 'endless new formal building' planned by the Emperor's protege, Baron Haussmann. She left Paris the next day without returning the Empress's call, a discourtesy which 'greatly vexed' the Imperial Court. 'It was no doubt a mere form,' commented Lord Stanley, the Foreign Secretary, after a conversation with the British Ambassador, 'and there was the excuse of want of time, but it is just on these points that the Imperial Court, as being parvenu, is touchy'.¹¹

Upon her arrival in Lucerne the local newspaper described the distinguished visitor as 'a woman of about fifty [she had celebrated her forty-ninth birthday three months before], not tall, fairly corpulent [Lord Stanley had described her the previous month as 'growing enormously fat'], with a red face and clad in mourning for her departed husband'.

Flustered as she had been in the heat of the train, she was relieved to find her 'own dear Scotch sociable' waiting for her at the station, 'driven from the box with 4 horses by a local coachman. I entered into it with the Children. Kanne sat on the box & Brown behind. '¹²

She was equally pleased to discover the Pension Wallis 'very comfortable and very cool';[lxiii] and for the next month she greatly enjoyed her holiday, sketching, going for rides and by steamer on the lake, nervously riding 'poor dear "Flora"' up mountain tracks and being carried down in chairs by porters, filling her journal with enthusiastic and rather trite descriptions of 'glorious scenery', 'feasts for the eyes', 'most splendid views', 'stupendous mountains ... beautiful beyond belief, 'stupendous rocks, so grand and wild', 'pictures of indescribable beauty'.

So as not to be bothered by official recognition she was travelling under the pseudonym of the Countess of Kent, a title she later abandoned, since Prince Alfred was Earl of Kent as well as Duke of Edinburgh, choosing instead the Countess of Lancaster or the Countess of Balmoral (which sounded 'very pretty') though everyone knew quite well that she was Queen of England, a fact which was made quite clear not only by her generous largesse to the local children who ran after her open landau shouting 'Madame la Reine!' but also by the sight of the royal standard flying over her hotel or villa and of John Brown sitting in the box-seat of her carriage, wearing his kilt and, on sunny days, incongruously, a topee, studiously ignoring the scenery which he affected to despise.¹³

'He is surly beyond measure,' Ponsonby recorded in April 1879 when the Queen went to Baveno on Lake Maggiore, 'and today we could see him all the way - a beautiful drive - with his eyes fixed on the horses' tails refusing to look up.' When they reached their destination, 'a lovely place', the Queen did not alight from the carriage. 'We believe it was because Brown would not allow her to get out. '¹⁴ But Brown, who, as the Queen said, had an 'increasing hatred of being "abroad"', did have his uses on the Continent, as at home. 'J. B., of course, asks for everything for the Queen as if he were in Windsor Castle,' Ponsonby told his wife, 'and if anything cannot be got he says it must - and it is.'¹⁵ He was, in fact, quite as domineering in Switzerland, Italy and Germany as he was in Scotland. In Coburg one day, for example, as he was about to take the Queen out for a drive, a German band appeared and started tootling and drumming in the street. 'Oh! I wish they would turn in,' she said. Immediately, Brown strode across to them and silenced them with four words directed at their conductor, 'Nix, nix boom boom!'¹⁶

The Director of Continental Journeys, J. J. Kanne, told Henry Ponsonby that Brown and Jenner between them would 'drive him mad ... Jenner, who has never seen foreign I [lavatories] before, runs about to each in a state of high disgust and says they must be entirely altered.'¹⁷

While Brown was permitted to do more or less as he liked on these foreign holidays, the Queen's gentlemen did not find her so undemanding. While she was staying at the Villa Clara, Baveno, Henry Ponsonby described how difficult she was to please on occasions:

Our expedition to Milan was a failure. The Queen was annoyed because Paget [Sir Augustus Paget, the British Ambassador] wanted to telegraph about it. Her idea was that she should go quite incog ... driving about with the Highlander on the box ... Then it poured. I hinted at a postponement but she said no she would go. So we went. There was a crowd at the station but the people were kept back. At the Cenacola not many and a dozen police, but even here H. M. thought they were too close to the carriage.

We saw the pictures in peace but in haste. At the Cathedral there was a crowd on the steps which increased inside ... This perturbed her and she complained to me that there were not more police. If she had gone as Queen we might have had fifty police there, but she had insisted over and over again that she would go quite privately...

As it rained the Queen drove in a shut carriage. She wouldn't go to the Brera - so we drove for an hour. And she wouldn't have Paget in her carriage - and she didn't ask Lady Paget to come. So ... she saw nothing. We men opened our carriage as it had ceased raining and saw a great deal. I stopped the carriage once and ran back to tell her these were San Lorenzo's columns. But this stopping of the carriage was coldly received and a crowd began to assemble to see the Highlander, so we went on - and I didn't trouble them again. In the evening the Queen began to reflect that she had seen very little. True. But whose fault?18

Insistent as she was about travelling incognito, she was perfectly content and was, indeed, pleased in her characteristically contradictory way, to be greeted with the by now familiar shouts of la Regina d'Inghilterra!' from children by the roadside as her carriage passed by with its escort of carabinieri along the shores of Lake Maggiore.

As well as to Baveno and Lucerne the Queen went on holiday to Baden-Baden and Coburg, Darmstadt, Aix-les-Bains, and Mentone - where she stayed at the Chalet des Rosiers and the town was illuminated in her honour - to Charlottenburg, Biarritz, Hyeres, Cannes, Florence and Grasse.[lxiv]

At Florence, which she visited in 1888, 1893 and 1894, she stayed first at the Villa Palmieri - which was lent her by the Countess of Crawford and Balcarres and was specially painted and decorated for her stay - then at the Villa Fabbricotti from which she was escorted on protracted rounds of sightseeing by her Indian servants, much to the astonishment of the Florentines who took them for princes from her empire in the east. Having spent several hours in 1888 being wheeled round the Uffizi, she passed sadly by the Casa Gherini where Prince Albert had stayed in 1838. She remembered how he had marvelled at the sculptures of Donatello, which were 'far more beautiful' than he had imagined, and how he had developed his taste for Italian primitives.

The Queen also listened sadly to the music of the organ in the Badia which Prince Albert had played. He had played the piano, too; but this had not been a success, since the only instrument he had been able to hire in Florence was old and out of tune.

One day during this same visit, an English boy, the Hon. George Peel, saw 'policemen clearing the way for a little carriage in the Piazza del Duomo'. 'In it was an old lady with a companion,' Peel told Sir Harold Nicolson over sixty years later. 'It was Queen Victoria. She stopped the carriage, fumbled in her corsage, and drew out a locket which she held up to the [recently restored] facade [of the Duomo].' 'The Lady-in-Waiting afterwards told Peel that it was a miniature of the Prince Consort. She thought it would interest him to see how the Duomo looked after being repaired.'¹⁹

The Queen was tireless in her sightseeing in Florence which, so she said, 'I delight to do'. She went to the Palazzo Pitti and the Boboli Gardens, to Santa Croce and Santa Maria Novella, the Baptistery and the Bargello. The Crown Princess was 'quite wrong' to suppose she did not care for art and architecture, though she had in all honesty to concede she was no sightseer when it came to Greek and Roman remains. She spent hours in the Uffizi and was 'delighted with the treasures of art to be seen to such great advantage there'.²⁰

Sir Augustus Paget's German wife, Walpurga Hohenthal, provided a description of her getting into her carriage in Florence in 1893 as she set out upon one of these excursions:

The Queen generally keeps her own carriage waiting for an hour. At last she came out, after an infinity of rugs, shawls, parasols and drawing material had preceded her. Carpeted steps were pushed near the carriage and a grey-headed Highlander on one side and a lemon-turbaned Indian on the other, lifted the old lady into the large landau. The stalwart Highlander closed the door of the carriage after the other ladies had got in, while the Indian with his delicate brown hands, pulled the Queen's gauze veil over her face. In her young and bell-like voice she then called out: 'To the Ponte Vecchio.' She was in black with a round white felt hat.21

The Queen eagerly looked forward to these foreign holidays and she much enjoyed them, despite the amount of paperwork she had to attend to almost every day, John Brown's grumpiness, her constant regret that Albert was not there to share her pleasure with her and her admission that sightseeing tired her 'most dreadfully and finally bored [her] too'.²² She filled letters and the pages of her journal with accounts of her diversions and enjoyments. She wrote of her ascent of Mount Pilate and the awesome sight of the St Gotthard Gorge, the even steeper ascent to La Grande Chartreuse where she asked for a glass of the monks' celebrated liqueur and where she was much taken with 'a very good-looking and tall young English monk with a beautiful, saintly, almost rapt expression' who knelt before her and kissed her hand, the peaceful woods outside Hyeres where Henry Ponsonby saw her one morning, limping along with Lady Churchill, followed by her bath chair and her patient, white donkey, 'Jacquot\ which she had bought from a peasant farmer whom she had come across on the shores of the Lac du Bourget. She wrote, too, of the delights of the Chalet des Rosiers which was surrounded by olive groves and had a beautiful view of the sea, the comfort of the Maison Mottet, later renamed the Villa Victoria, at Aix-les-Bains, where the scenery was 'quite splendid' and where, so Henry Ponsonby recorded, 'she heard noises below her room and, not being sure whether it was the regular rumblings of an earthquake or what, she sent for Hyam, the footman-in-waiting, who had the audacity to say "I think it must be Sir Henry."' 'It is true,' Ponsonby added, 'I do live just under the Queen and it is true I went to bed early, but I don't believe it was my snoring. However, the anecdote has caused great hilarity in our circles, in which I do not join.'²³

The Queen also recalled with pleasure her excursion in 1889 from Biarritz into Spain, the first reigning English monarch to have been in that country, her drive through the streets of San Sebastian with the Queen Regent, Maria Christina, the cheering crowds, the black horses looking like animals in a painting by Velasquez, her reception by the officials of the municipality who did their best to make her feel at home by offering her a cup of tea which proved to be quite undrinkable. And she looked back with equal pleasure on her days staying at the Grand Hotel at Grasse in 1891 when, although seventy-two, she behaved as though she were seventeen, so Marie Mallet thought, looking as 'fresh as a daisy' going out for a two-hour drive, though the mistral was at its height, and coming back covered in dust, as 'white as a miller'.²⁴

In 1895 the Queen went to Cimiez and liked the place so much that she went back every year for the next four years, staying at first at the Grand, then at the Hotel Excelsior, renamed in her honour the Excelsior Regina, where the President of France, Felix Faure, who was staying at the Riviera Palace, came to pay his respects. Since her interpretation of the protocol to be observed on such a reception of a president precluded her greeting him as she would have done a sovereign, she called the Prince of Wales over from Cannes and had him receive her visitor downstairs and bring him up. 'The three Princesses and the ladies were at the top of the stairs,' she recorded. 'I stood at the door of the drawing-room and asked him to sit down. He was very courteous and amiable, with a charming manner, so grand seigneur and not at all parvenu [his father had been a furniture maker in a small way of business in Paris]. He avoided all politics, but said kindly how I was aimee par la population, that he hoped I was comfortably lodged, etc.'[lxv]²⁵

When staying at Cimiez the Queen frequently drove over to Nice, that 'Paradise of nature', where she regularly attended the Battle of Flowers, delighting in pelting the floats and keeping footmen busy in supplying her with plenty of blossoms. It was at Cimiez that she spent her last foreign holiday; and she left it with deep regret. 'I shall mind returning to the sunless north,' she wrote in her journal. 'But I am so grateful for all I have enjoyed here.'²⁶

She had hoped to return to Cimiez the following year; but the increasingly outspoken attacks on her country in French newspapers had made another visit inadvisable while the Boer war was still being fought, so she decided to go to Ireland instead. It was 'entirely her own idea', she told the Empress Frederick, 'as was [her] giving up going abroad - and it will,' she added 'give gt pleasure & do good'.

Over fifty years earlier, in 1849, she had gone to Ireland with her husband and four eldest children and she had been much impressed by the good looks of the women, even though so many of them were in rags. They were 'really very handsome - quite in the lowest class ... such beautiful black eyes and hair and such fine colour and teeth'. The crowds were 'noisy and excitable but very good-natured, running and pushing about, and laughing, talking, and shrieking' rather than cheering. She had landed at Cove which was renamed - but only temporarily renamed - Queenstown 'in honour of it being the first spot on which [she] set foot upon Irish ground'; and 'along the road to Dublin the masses of human beings', the bands, the 'waving of hats and handkerchiefs, the bursts of welcome which rent the air - all made it a never-to-be forgotten scene, when one reflected how lately the country had been in open revolt and under martial law' during the famine and the violence of the earlier 1840s which had led her to declare that, while their sufferings 'really were too terrible to think of, the Irish were 'a terrible people'.²⁷ The more one did for them, 'the more unruly and ungrateful they seemed to be'.²⁸ Prince George of Cambridge, who had been responsible for the military arrangements, confirmed that the Queen had been greeted with the utmost enthusiasm on this visit. It was, he had thought, 'impossible any longer to doubt that Irishmen are at heart thoroughly Royalistically inclined, if only the agitators would leave them in peace'.²⁹

The Queen had returned to Ireland in 1861, when the Prince of Wales was attached to the Grenadier Guards in the Curragh Camp near Dublin. But she had not been in Ireland since; and she felt the bravery of the Irish soldiers in South Africa deserved recognition by her visit and by the establishment of a new regiment, the Irish Guards. As in 1849, she was much touched by the warmth of her reception by the loyalists, knowing nothing of the boos and catcalls of the Republicans and the tearing down of Union Jacks in the broken windows of shops in Dublin. Her equerry, Henry Ponsonby's son, Frederick, was with her and recalled:

There were crowds of people practically all the way, but when we got into Dublin the mass of people wedged together in the street and in every window, even on the roofs, was quite remarkable. Although I had seen many visits of this kind, nothing had ever approached the enthusiasm and even frenzy displayed by the people of Dublin. There were, however, two places where I heard ugly sounds like booing, but they only seemed like a sort of bagpipe drone to the highly-pitched note of the cheering.30

'Felt quite sorry that all was over,' the Queen wrote on her return to England in April 1900. 'I can never forget the really wild enthusiasm and affectionate loyalty displayed by all in Ireland, and shall ever retain a most grateful remembrance of this warm-hearted, sympathetic people.'³¹

She had been in England for less than a month when news arrived from South Africa of the relief of Mafeking. The people went 'quite mad with delight', she recorded in her journal. She herself was visiting Wellington College where her grandson, Princess Beatrice's son, 'Drino', had started his first term; and she was greeted by a banner stretched across an arch to 'welcome the Queen of Mafeking'. When she returned to Windsor Castle she was welcomed by a crowd of Eton boys gathered in the Upper Quadrangle to sing patriotic songs to her. She leaned out of her window to say, 'Thank you, thank you', repeating the words many times; and, as she listened to the last song, the boys were intrigued to see an Indian servant appear by her side to hand her a scotch and soda.³²

Chapter 57 DEATH OF BROWN

One morning in March 1883, a year after the attempt upon her life by the Scottish soi-disant poet, Roderick Maclean, John Brown had woken up at Windsor with a high fever and a return of the swellings on his face and head indicative of the erysipelas which had troubled him before. He was said to be 'quite helpless all day'. He had recently caught a severe cold while driving through an icy wind in an open dog cart to deliver a message from the Queen to Lady Florence Dixie, in Dr Reid's opinion 'rather a queer customer', who complained improbably that she had been assaulted by two men, possibly Fenians, dressed as women, and had been saved from serious injury only by the sudden appearance of her St Bernard dog.¹

The days passed and Brown - who had spent hours searching for the Fenians or for clues that might lead to their apprehension - lay increasingly ill in the Clarence Tower. On 26 March Dr Reid noted that 'he was worse' and, additionally, suffering from delirium tremens.² The Queen was not, of course, told of this; indeed she was unaware of how ill he was. There was, in any case, no question of her going to see him, since she had fallen downstairs the week before and had subsequently suffered a succession of extremely painful rheumatic attacks and sleepless nights. 'She is confined to her couch,' Dr Reid wrote home to his mother, 'and has me in to see her very often.' She managed to walk round her sitting room, supported on his arm; but she could not climb the stairs. On the 27th Reid reported to his mother that he thought that Brown would die; and by then the Queen had worked herself up 'into a great state of grief about him'.³

Brown did die that night; and, when told of his death by Prince Leopold, who had 'deep sympathy' for her 'without being sorry for the cause',⁴ she was said to be inconsolable, in her own words 'very miserable and stunned'. Supported by Princess Beatrice, she managed to hobble up the stairs to Clarence Tower for the funeral service which was held in the room where her friend had died and where he lay as though in state for six days. A wreath of white flowers and myrtle placed on the coffin, which was to be taken for burial at Crathie, bore the legend: 'From his best and most faithful friend, Victoria R. I'.

'I have lost my dearest best friend who no-one in this World can ever replace,' she wrote to her grandson, Prince George of Wales. 'Never forget your poor sorrowing old Grandmama's best & truest friend.' 'He became my best & truest friend,' she repeated in a letter to the minister at Crathie. 'Weep with me,' she asked Brown's sister-in-law, 'for we all have lost the best, the truest heart that ever beat. My grief is unbounded, dreadful and I know not how to bear it, or how to believe it possible ... Dear, dear John - my dearest best friend to whom I could say everything & who always protected me so kindly. You have your husband - your support, but I have no strong arm now.'

To her daughter Vicky, the Queen wrote: 'I feel so stunned and bewildered. He protected me so - that I felt safe! And now all, all is gone in this world, and all seems unhinged again in thousands of ways ... The shock - the blow, the blank, the constant missing at every turn of the one strong, powerful arm and head ... This anguish that comes over me like a wave ... is terrible ... God's will be done but I shall never be the same again.'

She told Vicky's youngest daughter that Brown, 'for 18 years & 1/2 had never left [her] for a single day'.

'Friends have fallen on all sides,' she wrote to Tennyson who provided her with a tribute for the plinth of a life-size statue commissioned from Joseph Edgar Boehm:

Friend more than servant, Loyal, Truthful, Brave!

Self less than Duty, even to the Grave

'One by one I have lost those I cared for and leant on most,' the Queen lamented. 'And now again I have lost one who humble though he was - was the truest and most devoted of all! He had no thought but for me, my welfare, my comfort, my safety, my happiness ... He was part of my life.' Even her letters to her young granddaughters were filled with such lamentations. 'I am in such terrible distress at the loss of my best & most faithful attendant ... my dearest and best friend,' she wrote to one of them, Princess Victoria of Hesse. 'I am so lonely and since dear Grandpapa was taken have one by one lost all those who cld be a help & support to me - & this one of my dear devoted, faithful attendant and trust [sic] friend ... whose help and support I miss hourly ... The constant missing of that dearest Brown depresses me so terribly & makes everything so sad and joyless.'⁵

To others she wrote and spoke in similar terms, expressing a sorrow that she felt she would carry with her to her own grave.[lxvi] She treasured the letters of condolence she received and she stuck the more feeling ones into a scrapbook. At the same time she decreed that Brown's room in the Clarence Tower should be preserved just as he had left it, and that a fresh flower should be placed every day upon his pillow. She set about raising memorials to him. As well as Boehm's statue at Balmoral, she ordered a granite seat inscribed with lines by Byron for Osborne and a life-size portrait from the German painter, Karl Sohn.[lxvii] She had a eulogy printed in the Court Circular - which was five times as long as that accorded to her other 'most valued and devoted friend', Disraeli - a bronze tablet erected to his memory in the mausoleum at Frogmore -with the word 'insribed' mispelled thus and not corrected - the only memorial there not commemorating a member of her family; and, to members of the Household, she gave various mementoes, most unwanted, such as the blue and gold enamel locket containing Brown's portrait which was presented to James Reid. Every year thereafter she went to Crathie to lay a wreath of flowers on his grave. To the horror of the Household, she planned a biography of Brown to be written, she hoped, by Sir Theodore Martin, the fifth volume of whose life of Prince Albert had been published in 1880.

Sir Theodore declined the project on the rather suspect grounds of his wife's ill health; but, undeterred by this, the Queen decided to write a memoir herself with the help of a Miss Murray MacGregor. Her intention, she told Henry Ponsonby, to whom she sent the manuscript of the first part of the book for his comments, was to show that John Brown had meant far more to her than a faithful servant. Ponsonby, aghast at what he had read and disclaiming any right to be considered a literary critic, suggested that Her Majesty approach men who were experienced in the matter. The Queen responded by complaining that Ponsonby had not said whether or not he liked the extracts which she had sent him. Put on the spot in this way, Ponsonby replied at length, tactfully assuring her that the memoir would be of great interest to all who had known Brown but bringing himself to express the opinion that certain passages might lend themselves to misinterpretation and that there might be critics who would doubt the wisdom of her revealing to the public at large her 'innermost and most sacred feelings'.

To this the Queen retorted that the book was 'not intended for publication but for private circulation'. She asked him to send the manuscript back to her as she wished to show it to Lord Rowton, Disraeli's former secretary, who did, at least, show 'gt interest in it'.⁶

Having read the manuscript, Rowton went to see Ponsonby. He fully agreed that it certainly should not be made public and suggested that some discreet printer should put it into type and by the time that this had been done, in about six months' time, Her Majesty 'would see how impossible it was to issue it'.⁷

Before this plan had been put into execution, however, Randall Davidson had become involved and had delicately suggested to the Queen that publication would be a mistake. She was as annoyed by Davidson's response as she had been by her Private Secretary's: she would certainly have the memoir printed. Davidson bravely repeated his advice in rather stronger terms. The Queen responded by demanding an apology and the withdrawal of his remarks. Davidson apologized but did not withdraw his advice and offered his resignation. For over a fortnight the Queen ignored his existence. Then she sent for him; she was perfectly agreeable; the memoir was not mentioned and, together with Brown's diary, was quietly destroyed. 'My belief,' Davidson commented, 'is that the Queen liked and trusted best those who incurred her wrath, provided that she had reason to think their motives good.'⁸

It did not, however, prove possible to prevent the publication, in February 1884, of a sequel to Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands, covering the years from 1862 to 1882, which was dedicated to her 'Loyal Highlanders and especially to the memory of [her] devoted personal attendant and faithful friend JOHN BROWN' whose loss was 'irreparable', for he deservedly possessed her 'entire confidence'. 'And to say,' she added, 'that he is daily, nay, hourly missed by me, whose lifelong gratitude he won by his constant care, attention and devotion, is but a feeble expression of the truth.'

The book was to be a resounding success with the general reader, but the family deplored its publication. Her eldest daughter could not bring herself to say more than that it described Balmoral very well; the 87-year-old Duchess of Cambridge castigated its 'bad, vulgar English': the book, in her opinion, was 'so miserably futile & trivial! So dull and uninteresting'.⁹ The Prince of Wales, holding 'very strong views on the subject', acknowledged the advance copy of the book which she sent him with a suggestion that it should be limited to private circulation. The Queen passed the letter to her secretary with a cross note to the effect that she thought it 'very strange that objections should come from that quarter where grt strictness of conduct [was] not generally much cared for [and where there was so] much talk and want of reticence'. To restrict the book to private circulation would be to limit the readership of the book to members of society, who were just the people least qualified to appreciate it. Changing tack, the Prince again wrote to his mother, this time to protest that, although he was well aware that the main purpose of the book was to describe her life in the Highlands, it might create surprise that the name of her eldest son never occurred in it.

To this the Queen riposted by asking if he had actually read the book himself or asked his 'so-called friends' to do so for him. Had he been kind enough to read it himself, he would have found that his name was mentioned on pages 1, 5, 8, 331 and 378. It would have been mentioned more often, the Queen did not forbear to add, if he had come to Balmoral more frequently.¹⁰ But then, as she complained on other occasions, he was far too occupied with the pleasures of his social round to spare much time for that.

Chapter 58 THE MUNSHI

In the summer of her Golden Jubilee Year of 1887, the Queen acquired the first of her Indian servants. She was delighted with them, and in particular with the stout and agreeable Mohammed Bukhsh and the taller, more handsome and ingratiating 24-year-old Abdul Karim, both of whom kissed her feet when they were presented to her at Windsor.¹ She had them stand behind her chair at breakfast as she ate a boiled egg in a gold eggcup with a gold spoon.² In accordance with her detailed instructions, they wore 'dark blue dress' when waiting at breakfast out of doors, with 'any "Pageri" (Turban) and sash they like, only not the Gold Ones'. At dinner they were to be dressed in scarlet and gold in winter, white in summer. Their hands clasped in front of their sashes, they stood motionless, Abdul Karim 'looking so distinguished' with his black beard and dark eyes in striking contrast with the white of his turban. In fact, she was quite sure, he was distinguished in his way, not really a servant at all: his father, she had been told, was a surgeon-general in the Indian Army. She raised him from the rank of khitmagar (waiter) to munshi (secretary), although he was barely literate; and, instead of cooking curries for her as he had done at first, he began to give her lessons in Hindustani. All photographs of him handing dishes to the Queen were destroyed.³

'I am learning a few words in Hindustani,' she wrote in her journal on 3 August. 'It is a great interest to me for both the language and the people, I have naturally never come into real contact with before.' The Munshi, as he came to be known, was a 'vy strict Master', though 'a perfect Gentleman'. 'He is zealous, attentive and quiet and gentle, has such intelligence and good sense,' the Queen told Dr Reid. 'He is useful for his great knowledge of his own language and ... he will soon be able to copy a good deal for the Queen.'⁴

Her Household profoundly wished that she had never in any way come into contact with the Munshi. He was so tiresome, so infuriatingly pretentious, so very far from the docile, obedient, 'grave and dignified' man whom the Queen had described. Taking their dislike of him to be prompted by the racial prejudice she so much abhorred, she ignored such hints about Abdul Karim's unwarranted pretentions as they dared to insinuate. She gave him permission to enter the billiard room as though he were one of her official secretaries and even to have meals in the household dining room. She provided him with a fully furnished bungalow at Windsor, eventually allowing him the use of cottages at Balmoral and Osborne also. She commissioned a portrait of him from the Austrian artist, Rudolph Swoboda, and took great care in making a copy of it herself.^5[lxviii] She allowed him to bring over from India so many female dependants that every time Dr Reid was asked to attend Mrs Abdul Karim a different tongue, so he said, was put out for his inspection. The Queen firmly scolded another of her Indians for declining to carry a message for the Munshi; and she reprimanded her equerry, Sir Fleetwood Edwards, for attempting to place him with the dressers at a theatrical performance. The year after his arrival, so Dr Reid told Sir William Jenner, she took him with her to Glassalt Shiel, her private retreat on Loch Muick.⁶

A few months later, when Abdul took to his bed with a painful carbuncle on his neck, the Queen visited him twice a day, 'examining his neck, soothing his pillows' and stroking his hand. When he began to get better the Hindustani lessons were resumed in his room.⁷

That year, at the Braemar games, he was allowed 'to make a very conspicuous figure among the gentry'.

The Duke of Connaught was angry and spoke to me about it [wrote Henry Ponsonby upon whom the Queen had pressed an unwanted Hindu vocabulary to study]. I replied that Abdul stood where he was by the Queen's order and that if it was wrong, as I did not understand Indian Etiquette and H.R.H. did, would it not be better for him to mention it to the Queen. This entirely shut him up.8

What concerned the gentlemen of her Household more than all this was her appointment of Abdul Karim as her 'Indian Secretary'. She told Ponsonby that he was 'most handy' in this respect, 'helping when she signs by drying the signatures. He learns with extraordinary assiduity.'⁹ There was no need to fear that she was indiscreet in employing him in this way. 'No political papers of any kind are ever in the Munshi's hands, even in her presence,' she assured Lord Salisbury. 'He only helps her to read words which she cannot read or merely submissions or warrants for signature. He does not read English fluently enough to be able to read anything of importance."⁰ Yet her Ministers were inclined to believe that, while she did, indeed, keep confidential papers from him, she entrusted him with more responsibility than her account of his assistance implied, made recommendations at his request and was persuaded to see Indian affairs from an exclusively Muslim point of view. Certainly, when told of a proposal to found a Muslim college, she promised to subscribe to it, adding that she would do so, 'even if it should mean giving something to a Hindoo College - but they do not need help as they have plenty.'¹¹

So much trust did the Queen appear to repose in Abdul Karim that it became a matter of serious concern that he was on very friendly terms with a young lawyer, Rafiuddin Ahmed, who was closely associated with the Muslim Patriotic League and was suspected of relaying to Afghanistan state secrets supplied to him by the Munshi.

The Secretary of State for India, Lord George Hamilton, expressed a doubt that it would be wise to send confidential papers to the Queen if she showed them to the Munshi and warned that Hindus in India would much resent a Muslim being trusted in the manner which Abdul Karim was. 'I do not think that the Munshi is as dangerous as some suppose,' Lord George told Lord Elgin, the Viceroy. 'Salisbury [the Prime Minister] concurs in that view.' But, he continued, the Munshi is 'a stupid man, & on that account he may become a tool in the hands of other abler men'.¹²

In 1894 a carefully worded protest to the Queen from four senior members of her Household about the indulgence shown to the Munshi, whose social origins were not as he pretended, drew forth a furious counterblast:

To make out that the ... poor good Munshi ... is low is really outrageous & in a country like England quite out of place ... She has known 2 Archbishops who were sons respectively of a Butcher & a Grocer, a Chancellor whose father was a poor sort of Scotch Minister, Sir D. Stewart and Ld Mt Stephen both who ran about barefoot as children ... and the tradesmen Maple and J. Price were made Baronets ... Abdul's father saw good & honourable service as a Dr & he [Abdul] feels cut to the heart at being thus spoken of. It probably comes from some low jealous Indians or Anglo-Indians ... The Queen is so sorry for the poor Munshi's sensitive feelings.13

Determined to silence his critics, the Queen now sent a telegram to Sir Henry Ponsonby's son, who was then serving as an aide-de-camp on the Viceroy's staff in India and was about to become an equerry at Court, asking him to seek out the Munshi's father and to report upon his position.

Of course I took steps to obey the Queen's commands [Frederick Ponsonby wrote in his memoirs] ... And when I returned home and took up my appointment the Queen asked whether I had seen Abdul Karim's father and I replied that ... the man was not a surgeon-general but only the apothecary at the jail ... She stoutly denied this and thought I must have seen the wrong man ... To mark her displeasure with me, the Queen did not ask me to dinner for a year.14

Frederick Ponsonby's revelation that the Munshi had lied about his parentage did nothing to lessen the Queen's regard for her 'Indian Secretary'. Randall Davidson and Prince Louis of Battenberg, who acted as go-betweens in the increasingly bitter dispute between the Queen and her Household, thought that the Queen was 'off her head' about her attitude to the exasperating man. She arranged for him to have a seat next to her lady-in-waiting at an evening entertainment; she persuaded the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for India to have him created a Companion of the Order of the Indian Empire; she wrote to the Empress Frederick to ask her to show him her house at Kronberg when he was in Germany: he ate no meat, just fruit, and drank a little milk; the Queen hoped she was not being troublesome.¹⁵ In 1894, when the Queen was staying at the Villa Fabbricotti in Florence, the Munshi sent an announcement to be inserted in the Florence Gazette together with a photograph of himself:

The Munshi Mohammed Abdul Karim son of Haji Dr Mohammed Wazirudin ... came to England in the service of the Queen Victoria Empress of India in the year 1887.

He was appointed first for some time as Her Majestys Munshi and Indian clerk. From 1892 he was appointed as Her M's Indian Secretary. He is belonging to a good and highly respectable Family. All is Family has been in Govt. Service with high position ... All the Indian attendants of the Queen are under him and he also wholes different duties to perform in Her Majesty's Service.16

While he was in Florence with the Queen, Dr Reid made a list of examples of the Munshi's dreadful behaviour, including his refusal to allow any Indians in the same railway carriage as himself, his appropriation of the bathroom and lavatory which had been allotted to Her Majesty's maids, and his complaint that Italian newspapers took too little notice of him. On learning of this complaint, the Queen told her wardrobe maid, Mrs Macdonald, to instruct her courier to see that more mention was made of him. 'The Italians,' Reid commented, 'say he is a "Principe Indiano" with whom the Queen is in love.'

Not long after the Queen's return from Florence, in January 1895, Frederick Ponsonby reported to the Viceroy, Lord Elgin:

I find the Munshi is a more difficult question to grapple with than I had thought. I thought that no one here had any idea of what the Munshi really was, but I find that not only all the Household but also Princess Louise, P. Beatrice and Prince Henry ... have spoken to the Queen about it and [the Prime Minister and Secretary of State for India] have done their best to explain to her the state of affairs. But she won't listen to any of them and thinks they know nothing about it ... It has been perfectly useless and the Munshi occupies very much the same position as John Brown used to do. I have been told that both your and Lady Elgin's letters are given him to read and that he retails all the news back to India.

There have been two rows lately, one when Edwards refused to go to tea with the Munshi and the other when Doctor Reid refused to take the Munshi's father round the hospitals in London, and in both cases the Queen refused to listen to what they had to say but was very angry, so as you see the Munshi is a sort of pet, like a dog or cat which the Queen will not willingly give up...

The Queen would listen to you if you could write and point out to her the importance of not elevating the Munshi to the position of a confidential adviser and explain to her what the feeling in India is with regard to the Munshi: that would be the only chance of getting her to listen.

At the tableaux the Munshi took a very prominent part, and a seat in the audience next to the Lady in Waiting (much to her disgust) was reserved for him by order from the Queen. The Khitmagar on duty helps the Queen to walk into dinner and even into the chapel here, so you will see how great is her opinion of all the natives here. I have now got to think it lucky that the Munshi's sweeper does not dine with us.17

When the Queen announced that she was going to take the Munshi in her entourage to Cimiez in 1897, the Household revolted since the presence of the man, now suffering from gonorrhoea, would entail their having to take their meals with him. They asked Harriet Phipps, the Queen's Personal Secretary, to tell Her Majesty that if the Munshi went to France they would regretfully have to resign. On being given this message the Queen lost her temper, which she had not done for years, and with a cataclysmic gesture she swept everything on her desk on to the floor.

For months the dispute continued, the Munshi causing further offence by arranging for the publication in the Daily Graphic of a photograph of himself with the Queen in which, document in hand, he appeared to be her mentor; Dr Reid becoming so worn out by the Queen's demands and intransigence, her complaints of being 'terribly annoyed and upset' by the 'stupid business', her being 'continually aggrieved' at her gentlemen wishing 'to spy upon and interfere with one of her people', that he fell ill and had to retire to bed with boils and carbuncles, while the gentlemen of the Household regaled each other with stories of the Munshi's outrageous presumption and of the Queen's peevishness and distress.

Lord Salisbury did what he could to help restore peace to the Household. Tactfully, he persuaded the Queen that when she went to Cimiez the French might not understand the position which 'Le Munchy' occupied in her Household and they might not be as polite as they should be. There was also the problem of arousing jealousy amongst her Hindu subjects should the Queen show particular favour to a Muslim. So the 'Indian Secretary' did not accompany the Household to Cimiez that year but to their consternation he turned up later, having invited his friend Ahmed to come as well. This was too much for them to stand.

Arthur Bigge, a 'clever, amiable and agreeable' - as well as that important consideration, 'good looking' - man who had, by then, succeeded Sir Henry Ponsonby as Private Secretary, insisted that Ahmed be sent away; while messages were sent to India requesting any information about the Munshi which might serve to persuade the Queen of his worthlessness. The Household themselves had done what they could to make her realize how impossible the man was. But it was 'no use', Frederick Ponsonby told the Viceroy's Private Secretary, 'for the Queen says it is "race prejudice" & that we are all jealous of the poor Munshi (!)."⁸

Lord George Hamilton thought that it would be as well not to make any more enquiries which might exacerbate this 'Court commotion'. He felt sure that the 'little storm' would soon subside, and that the Munshi would 'hereafter be on the decline'. Bigge assured him that the Household would ensure that the Munshi would now be put in his 'proper place'.

The Queen was determined, however, that the Munshi should not be humiliated. She had already 'got into a most violent passion' with Dr Reid who, with the support of the Prince of Wales, was brave enough to tell her that there were 'people in high places' who were saying to him that the 'only charitable explanation' of her support and defence of the Munshi was that she was not sane. She raged against Fleetwood Edwards for daring to oppose her giving way to the Munshi's demands that he should be appointed a Member of the Victorian Order. In enormously long letters to Dr Reid she complained of the distorted and exaggerated stories which were spread about her 'poor friend' who was so shamefully persecuted; and on Christmas Day 1897 during 'a most stormy talk for three quarters of an hour with the Queen about the Munshi', she grew, in Reid's words, 'quite mad with rage'.¹⁹ She berated the India Office for suggesting that he was not a gentleman; when the Aga Khan came to Windsor she saw to it that he had a conversation with her 'Indian Secretary'; she told Lord Curzon, who succeeded Lord Elgin as Viceroy of India, not to believe the derogatory rumours circulating about the Munshi and his family; she asked the Lord Chamberlain, the Earl of Hopetoun, to set a good example at Windsor by being polite to him. She was equally attentive to the interests of Rafiuddin Ahmed to compensate for the 'disgraceful affair' of his being expelled from Cimiez, requiring that he be invited to a court ball, suggesting that he be employed in gathering information from Mohammedans that might be useful to the Government, and asking that he should be awarded a Jubilee medal which, after all, was given to 'clergymen, actors, artists', so why not to him?

Before her penultimate holiday at Cimiez, the Queen, who had long since taken to ending letters to the Munshi with the words, 'Your loving Mother', wrote to the Munshi to say: 'I have in my Testamentary arrangements secured your comfort and have constantly thought of you well. The long letter I enclose which was written nearly a month ago is entirely and solely my own idea, not a human being will ever know of it or what you answer me. If you can't read it I will help you then burn it at once. Your faithful true friend VRI.'²⁰

She had already made her peace with Frederick Ponsonby whose revelation of the occupation of the Munshi's father had so offended her. Not once having invited him to dinner or even addressed a word to him during that year's visit to Cimiez - although one of the reasons for wanting him as an equerry was his good command of French, an ability of which she had taken note when seeing him perform in a French play at Osborne - she turned to him as she was leaving and said, 'What a pity it is to leave Nice in such beautiful weather!' For her, it was a kind of apology.²¹

After her return from Cimiez the gentlemen of the Household found the Munshi rather less obtrusive; but he retained his office and his cottages, and he retained the Queen's professed regard. And, although she confessed to Dr Reid that she sometimes quite dreaded seeing him because of the further 'trouble and mischief he was liable to provoke, she resisted all hints that he should be sent back to India.²² Indeed, Lord Salisbury was of the opinion that she quite enjoyed the squabbles he provoked since they were 'the only form of excitement she can have'.[lxix]²²

Chapter 59 DIAMOND JUBILEE

'Today is the day,' the Queen wrote in her journal on 23 September 1896, 'on which I have reigned longer, by a day, than any English sovereign. '¹

That autumn was a happy time for her. General Kitchener was doing well in the Sudan; Lord Salisbury's third Cabinet, formed the year before, was proving so much more amenable than any of Mr Gladstone's: 'Every day,' she told Salisbury, 'I feel the blessing of a strong Government in such safe and strong hands as yours.'² And, towards the end of September, Princess Alice's beautiful daughter, Alexandra, known as Alicky, came with her husband, Tsar Nicholas II, to stay at Balmoral.

The Queen had at first been much against Alicky's proposed marriage to the Tsarevich. She had hoped that she would marry her grandson, Prince Albert Victor, whom she had described, without too strict a regard for the truth, as not only 'kind' and 'affectionate' but also steady;³ and she had viewed the prospect of the girl's marriage to the Tsarevich with alarm 'on account of the country, the policy and differences with us and the awful insecurity to which that sweet child will be exposed'. When his father, Tsar Alexander III, died in November 1894 the Queen's fears for the future were increased by the thought of the 'sweet innocent gentle' girl being placed on 'that very unsafe Throne' and having her life 'constantly threatened'.⁴ It was a 'great additional anxiety' to her in her 'declining years'.

Yet when she got to know Nicky she could well understand why Alicky wanted to marry him: she had 'never met a more amiable, simple young man, affectionate, sensible and liberal-minded'. Besides, Anglo-Russian relations might well be improved by his marriage to Queen Victoria's granddaughter.

Nicky himself, who had stayed at Windsor in 1894, was made to feel quite at home. 'It feels funny to me,' he had told his brother Georgy, 'the extent to which I have become part of the English family. I have become almost as indispensable to [the Queen] as her Indians and her Scotsmen; I am, as it were, attached to her and the best thing is that she does not like me to leave her side ... She exudes such enormous charm.'⁵

She much enjoyed the Tsar's company when he returned from Russia to stay at Balmoral in 1896; but he was not so taken with life in Scotland. He complained of having to go out shooting 'all day long'; and of the house being 'colder than Siberia'; and of suffering from toothache and a cheek 'much swollen from irritation at the stump of a decayed molar'.⁶ On a particularly wet and stormy day he and the Tsarina were required to go to church where Lady Lytton thought it was 'very interesting seeing the two pews full of the Royalties and the Emperor and Empress standing by the Queen even in the Scotch Kirk [at Crathie] where all is simple and reverent'.⁷ As though in relief that the visit was over, the Tsar gave the Master of the Household £1,000 to be distributed amongst the servants upon his departure, and to Sir James Reid who had cured his toothache he gave 'a gold cigarette case with his Imperial arms in gold and diamonds in the corner'.⁸

While he was still at Balmoral numerous telegrams 'kept coming in all day' to congratulate the Queen on her having reigned even longer than George III. 'People wished to make all sorts of demonstrations,' she wrote in her journal, 'which I asked them not to do until I had completed the sixty years next June.'⁹

Preparations for these celebrations in June had already begun; and the suggestion put forward by Joseph Chamberlain that, rather than European royalties as guests, prime ministers from the countries of the Empire should be invited to the Diamond Jubilee was gratefully accepted by the Queen who was profoundly thankful that she would not therefore have to fill Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle with unwelcome relations and their suites and especially gratified that she would have a perfect excuse for not inviting the Kaiser. She did, however, invite her cousin, the King of the Belgians, and his younger daughter, Princess Clementina. It was also proposed that, in view of the Queen's age, the programme of events should be less demanding than it had been ten years before. There was to be a family service in St George's Chapel on Sunday 20 June at eleven o'clock to coincide with services at other places of worship all over the country. At the Royal Family's service Prince Albert's Te Deum was to be sung as well as a Jubilee hymn set to music by Sir Arthur Sullivan.[lxx] Alfred Austin, by now Poet Laureate, had offered the words for this hymn; but Sullivan had rejected them as unsuitable and the hymn had been written instead shortly before his death by Walsham How, Bishop of Wakefield, at the request of the Prince of Wales.

On 22 June the early morning was overcast, but at a quarter past eleven, as cannon boomed in Hyde Park to announce the departure of the Queen from Buckingham Palace to St Paul's Cathedral, the sun came out as it had done for her Golden Jubilee in obedience to the tradition which had become known as 'Queen's Weather'. Wearing a black silk dress, which was rendered less lugubrious by panels of grey satin, and with white flowers and a white aigrette in her bonnet, the Queen drove to the Cathedral in an open landau with the Princess of Wales and Princess Helena who was taking the place of Her Majesty's eldest daughter since Vicky's rank as Empress prevented her sitting with her back to the horses. The acclamations which greeted the Queen moved her to tears. 'How kind they are,' she said more than once, as the Princess of Wales leant forward to pat her hand in a gesture of both sympathy and congratulation. 'No one ever, I believe, has met with such an ovation as was given to me, passing through those six miles of streets,' she wrote in her journal. 'The crowds were quite indescribable, and their enthusiasm really marvellous and deeply touching. The cheering was quite deafening, and every face seemed to be filled with real joy.'¹⁰

'We were seated under the right wing of the National Gallery & could see right down Pall Mall & right up Charing Cross,' wrote Lady Monkswell in her account of the procession. 'It was overwhelming looking round upon the sea of people.'

We did not pay any attention to the first 7 carriages [she continued]. But we woke up very wide when those containing the little Batten-berg, Connaught and Albany children came by, the children bowing their little best & beginning to look [very tired] ... The papers say the little Duke of Albany fainted before he got home, & I can quite believe it... Then we beheld the dear old Queen, - & what a cheer they gave her, it made the tears come to my eyes. She was sitting quite upright & brisk in the carriage not looking flushed or overcome, but smiling & bowing. She was dressed in grey & black, & held in her hand the very long-handled black lace parasol lined with white, given her by Mr. Charles Villiers, the oldest M.P. [Lady Lytton's uncle, Member for Wolverhampton since 1835]. She held it high up so that we could see her face. Now I reflect upon it, her attitude expressing so much vigour, her bows which made so much impression upon me (I got one to myself at a Drawing-room & remember it now, & her keen blue eyes) what she had already done that week & what she had still to do. I cannot believe that she is in her 79th year.

When she was passed & we felt that we had done our Jubilee I had an over-powering emotion of thankfulness & satisfaction that I, with husband & sons, had been present at this great, this tremendous occasion.11

The Queen rode along, the tears occasionally trickling down her cheeks, the Commander-in-Chief, Lord Wolseley, trotting in front of her, the Earl of Dundonald, colonel of the 2nd Life Guards, immediately behind, having some trouble with his mare and calling out 'Steady, old lady! Whao, old girl!' - injunctions which the Queen at first supposed to be addressed to her.¹²

After a short service conducted beside the Cathedral steps, the Queen drove on across London Bridge and through the gaily decorated streets of the East End which were filled with cheering people who seemed, she said, 'delighted to see their little old Queen'. She crossed Westminster Bridge, drove through Parliament Square, past Horse Guards Parade and up The Mall back to the Palace. All had 'gone off splendidly' in the words of the Prince of Wales, the only mishap occurring when the 75-year-old Lord Howe, overcome by the heat, fainted and fell off his horse.

As in 1887, after the Golden Jubilee parade, the next few days were busy and tiring. Again there were receptions and garden parties, military reviews, banquets and parades of troops from all over the Empire, and a march past of some four thousand boys from several public schools, all cheering as they passed Her Majesty, the Eton and Harrow boys looking, she thought, rather smarter than the rest.

She was given a welcome quite as vociferous three years later when, after the relief of Ladysmith in February 1900, the second war against the Boers in South Africa seemed to be reaching a not too inglorious conclusion. Throughout both wars, the first to be fought against a white enemy since the Crimean War, she had maintained an indomitable confidence, condemning the Boers as a 'horrid people, cruel 8c over-bearing', bidding farewell to her soldiers with a lump in her throat, sending them parcels of knitted garments and 100,000 tins of chocolate, welcoming them home on their return, vainly endeavouring to ensure that coloured troops should serve alongside white in battle, visiting hospitals, and going to open one in Bristol, visiting Woolwich Arsenal where the cheers of the thousands of workers 'quite drowned out' the band playing 'God Save the Queen', confessing that reading telegrams always made her feel ill, often breaking down and crying, so Frederick Ponsonby said, over the long lists of casualties,¹³ yet all the time insisting, even at the most worrying periods, that there was no one depressed in her own Household, that the war must be won even if the whole army had to go out. When A. J. Balfour, First Lord of the Treasury, came to Windsor with a gloomy report shortly after the British reverses in the 'Black Week' of December 1899, 'he was at once cut short with the characteristic, quick little bend of the head in which all regality seemed concentrated: "Please understand that there is no depression in this house; we are not interested in the possibilities of defeat; they do not exist." '¹⁴

As she had done during the Crimean War the Queen took great interest in the distribution of medals. 'There was a pathetic moment yesterday,' Reginald Brett wrote in his diary after one investiture, 'when the Queen was wheeled up to Findlater and the other wounded V.C, both sitting in chairs. They were ordered to rise but the Queen said, "Most certainly not," and raised herself without help (a very unusual thing) and stood over them while she decorated them with the Cross.'¹⁵

Chapter 60 LIFE AT COURT

When in 1894 Frederick Ponsonby had arrived at Osborne aged twenty-seven, he had found that all the senior gentlemen of the Household had grown old in the Queen's service - two of them were eighty - and that he himself as Junior Equerry had very little to do. After breakfast he went to the equerries' room where he read the newspapers and wrote private letters. At noon the Queen went out in her pony-chair, accompanied by a lady-in-waiting, a maid-of-honour or one of her daughters, regardless of the weather: it was not considered in the least surprising that Princess Beatrice suffered from rheumatism at an early age. As soon as the Queen had driven away, the Household, who had to remain indoors so long as the Queen was in the house, walked out too. 'But it was like a lunatic asylum,' Ponsonby said, 'as everybody went alone in different directions.'

Luncheon for the gentlemen was served at two o'clock, the Master of the Household carving at one end of the table and the Junior Equerry at the other. 'These luncheons were always very amusing,' Ponsonby discovered, 'as there was much wit among the older men.'

At three o'clock the Queen went out driving again, this time in a carriage and pair with an outrider in front and, if she were going to Cowes or some other town on the island, an equerry riding alongside the carriage, two equerries being required when Her Majesty had to attend some sort of function. Again the gentlemen took the opportunity of the Queen's departure to go out themselves, either for a walk or a ride, using only those particular carriages, divided into five categories, which were allotted to their use, and making sure that they did not come across her, since, as Ponsonby said, 'it was a great crime to meet her in the grounds ... and we all took good care that this should never happen. If by any unlucky chance we did come across her, we hid behind bushes. Sir William Harcourt [the Chancellor of the Exchequer], walking one day with my father, looked up and saw the Queen coming down the path. There was only one small shrub near, and Harcourt asked whether he was expected to hide behind that, but as he was six feet four inches high, my father suggested that the wisest thing to do was to turn back.' Nor was it only Ministers and members of the Household who were required to avoid Her Majesty: new servants were not allowed to look her in the face, and when receiving orders had to gaze at the ground at her feet. If by chance they came across her in a corridor she would look straight ahead as though she had not noticed they were there.¹

The Queen was in the habit of protesting strongly against the social prejudices of the upper classes. 'The division of classes is the one thing which is most dangerous & reprehensible,' she once wrote, 'never intended by the law of nature & wh the Queen is always labouring to alter.' Yet, the social hierarchy of her own Household was a rigid one: it was possible to cross the barriers, as John Brown had done, but the barriers were never lowered.

Having evaded the Queen, the members of the Household returned to the house when she did, the gentlemen being served tea in their own rooms, the ladies having 'a big tea' together. Then 'there was nothing for [Ponsonby] to do until dinner'.

The next year, however, Ponsonby was appointed Assistant Private Secretary and he then found his time fully occupied in cyphering and decyphering messages; dealing with a mass of correspondence which Arthur Bigge left for his attention; making notes of all the papers which were sent to the Queen in case an important document, which she might keep for as long as a week, did not return; copying out parts of despatches which the Queen wanted to keep for her files; learning shorthand; improving his German and studying the Almanac de Gotha so that he could make himself more familiar with the complicated ramifi- cations of the royal family tree. He was also responsible for preparing the data on which the Queen based certain entries in her diary as she liked to be quite sure of the complete accuracy of her facts, though evidently she was not above allowing the occasional misstatement to appear when it cast her in a favourable or flattering light. Thus it was that in recounting the Queen's review of her colonial troops in 1897, Ponsonby - while knowing it to be false - included a statement, which had appeared in the newspapers, to the effect that Her Majesty had spoken to the Indian officers in Hindustani. When this was read out to her she objected, 'That's not true. I did not speak in Hindustani, but in English.' She was therefore asked if this part of the account should be omitted. 'No,' she decided. 'You can leave it, for I could have done so had I wished.'²

Another of Frederick Ponsonby's duties was to look after the Queen's birthday books by which she set great store, taking the latest volumes about with her wherever she went so that people on occasions mistook them for Bibles, and insisting that all the people who visited her should sign their names on the appropriate page. The German Secretary was nominally in charge of these books and was responsible for compiling their indexes. But he did not carry out his duties as well as he should have done, and the onus of keeping the books up to date fell upon Ponsonby. Once when the Queen was staying in Nice at the Hotel Regina it was suggested to her that Sarah Bernhardt, who was acting at the theatre in the town, should be invited to give a recital in the hotel. The Queen was at first reluctant, knowing that Bernhardt's morals were far from being above reproach. Later, however, she changed her mind, attended the recital of Theuriet's Jean Marie which she thought 'quite marvellous, so pathetic and full of feeling', and, much impressed by the virtuosity of the great actress whose cheeks were wet with tears, she asked one of her ladies to present her to her so that she could compliment her. On Bernhardt's leaving the room the Queen sent to enquire if her autograph had been procured for the Birthday Book. Ponsonby was proud to have remembered to ensure that it was. He had watched with satisfaction mingled with astonishment as Bernhardt had taken the book from him, placed it on the floor, knelt in front of it, and scrawled across it, 'Le plus beau jour de ma vie', followed by a flamboyant signature. Ponsonby proudly sent up the book for the Queen to see. But, having done his 'duty nobly', as he thought, he got 'no marks'. First of all it was the wrong book: he ought to have used the artists' book. Second, he should have prevented Miss Bernhardt from taking up the whole page.²

Towards the end of her life the Queen became an increasingly trying mistress because of her failing sight for which surgery was unsuccessfully proposed by 'one of the greatest oculists in Europe', Professor Hermann Pagenstecker, the Queen preferring to rely on belladonna to disperse the film. This proving less than satisfactory, her handwriting became increasingly difficult to read, while her secretaries were obliged to write in larger, more clearly formed characters and, therefore, more slowly.[lxxi] Ponsonby, resourceful as ever, bought some copy-books printed for girls' schools with the help of which he perfected a completely new hand. He also bought 'some special ink like boot varnish'; and, having used this to write his document, he dried it over a copper tray heated by a spirit lamp, an invention of Sir Arthur Bigge's. But this method did not satisfy the Queen. Since the thick black ink showed through the paper, only one side could be used which rendered the documents she had to read too bulky for her taste. She, therefore, issued instructions for Ponsonby to revert to his former practice of writing on both sides of the paper. So Ponsonby applied to the Stationery Office for a supply of paper the same size as the sheets then in use but very much thicker. At first the new paper was acceptable; but, as the Queen liked to keep all messages in her room for some time, she soon found that the accumulation of paper was inconvenient: would Captain Ponsonby kindly revert to the ordinary paper.

'I grasped then that it was hopeless', Ponsonby recorded, 'and I consulted Sir James Reid as to whether it would not be possible to explain all the difficulties to her, but he said he feared her sight was going and that any explanation would therefore be useless. So I went back to the ordinary paper and ordinary ink, and of course received a message to say would I write blacker, but as it was hopeless I didn't attempt to alter anything.'[lxxii]

In the end documents had to be read to her. Much of this reading was done by Princess Beatrice, her youngest child, which led to what Ponsonby called 'absurd mistakes'. Ponsonby wrote to his mother:

The Queen is not even au courant with the ordinary topics of the present day. Imagine [Princess] B[eatrice] trying to explain ... our policy in the East. Bigge or I may write out long precis of [such] things but they are often not read to HM as [Princess] B[eatrice] is in a hurry to develop a photograph or wants to paint a flower for a Bazaar ... Apart from the hideous mistakes that occur ... there is the danger of the Q's letting go almost entirely the control of things which should be kept under the immediate supervision of the Sovereign ... The sad thing is that it is only her eyes, nothing else. Her memory is still wonderful, her shrewdness, her power of discrimination as strong as ever, her long experience of European politics alone makes her opinion valuable but when her sole means of reading despatches, precis, etc. lie in [Princess] B[eatrice], it is simply hopeless.3

Before going down to dinner all the men dressed up in knee-breeches and stockings even if they were going to the Household dining room rather than joining the Queen's dinner-party.[lxxiii] 'The silence in the house was almost oppressive at dinner-time,' Ponsonby said, 'and those who were asked to dine with the Queen solemnly walked down the corridor, with mosaic floors and statues, talking almost in a whisper... At Balmoral the Queen's dinners were necessarily not large as there were not many people to ask. The conversation was supposed to be general, but the custom was to talk to one's neighbour in very low tones, and those on the right and left of Her Majesty were the only ones who spoke up.' Occasionally, as the Queen's eyesight worsened, there were embarrassing moments when she failed to recognize her neighbour, as she did one evening in 1899 when the Master of the Household made a mistake in compiling the seating list which led her to turn to the French ambassador and, supposing him to be the Italian as the list had indicated, asked him, 'where is your King now?'⁴

At these dinners a great deal depended upon what kind of mood the Queen was in: when she was rather preoccupied and silent the meal was a dismal occasion. Ponsonby's father described a particularly depressing one. The Queen, who had a cold, sat between her son, Prince Leopold, who 'never uttered', and Lord Gainsborough, who was deaf. The prolonged silences were broken only by various types of cough, 'respectable', 'deep', or 'gouty', and by 'all the servants dropping plates and making a clatteration of noises'.⁵ No doubt they were drunk, as they often were, the Queen, as Dr Reid said, being astonishingly lenient about drunkenness among her servants, and instructing him 'on no account to tell the Ladies and Gentlemen that Hugh Brown [John Brown's brother] had died of alcoholic poisoning!!'[lxxiv]⁶

Softly as those further away from Her Majesty spoke, she would often overhear a word and ask what they were talking about. Once, having heard Alick Yorke, the groom-in-waiting, mention something about a queen, she called across to him to ask which queen he was talking about. Told that it was Mary Tudor, she commented, 'Oh! My bloody ancestor.'

It was Alick Yorke who, at another of the Queen's dinners, amused a German guest so much that a loud guffaw was heard at the other end of the table. The Queen asked Yorke to repeat the joke. Unwisely he did so; it was rather a risque story; the Queen looked at him with her basilisk's stare and, mindful that there were young ladies present, delivered herself of her most celebrated reprimand: 'We are not amused.'[lxxv]⁷

Chapter 61 DINNER PARTIES

The Countess of Lytton, who arrived at Court in 1895 to fill a vacancy which had occurred among the Queen's ladies-in-waiting, found most of Her Majesty's dinners rather irksome affairs. On her arrival one bitterly cold October afternoon she was greeted by Harriet Phipps, the Queen's Personal Secretary, who, like all the bedchamber women and maids-of-honour who did not have titles, was given the rank of a baron's daughter and was therefore known as the Honourable Harriet Phipps. Miss Phipps took Lady Lytton into a small room, formerly the Prince Consort's dressing room which was used for receiving visitors upstairs. She was presented with the Victoria and Albert Order which all the Queen's ladies wore, attached to a white ribbon, on their dresses. And, on returning to her room, she was told by a servant who knocked on the door: 'You are invited to dine with the Queen, miladi.'

She went down to the dining room where she waited with the other guests until the announcement, 'The Queen has arrived' drew them all to the door. The Queen came into the room, leaning on the arm of an Indian servant, went through to the dining room and took her place at the table. 'The beginning of the dinner was rather solemn,' Lady Lytton recorded in her diary. The Queen hardly spoke at all during the early courses; and it was not until she made some remark about the Spanish Ambassador having 'come in the afternoon and [expecting] to be received at once without making an appointment' that the atmosphere became more relaxed as the guests laughed 'for some little time' at this odd ignorance of protocol.¹ At a subsequent dinner the atmosphere was 'very solemn and the room so cold'. On such occasions the Queen rejected dishes she did not like with 'a peevish moue with crumpled brow more eloquent than words', and she spoke little, and, when she did, her remarks were far from memorable. Indeed, Lord Ribblesdale said they were conventional in the extreme. 'One way or another,' he wrote in his memoirs, 'I must have dined many times at the Queen's dinner party, and I personally never heard her say anything at dinner which I remembered next morning.'²

At least the smaller and less formal dinners did not last very long since, throughout her life, the Queen continued to eat a great deal very rapidly, the courses of soup, fish, meat and pudding soon being despatched together with a large amount of fruit, preferably pears, oranges - which she ate with a spoon having scooped out a hole in the top -and apples grown in an orchard at Windsor extending to four acres.³

The food served was generally agreed to be excellent at all the four separate dinners which were served each evening, those for the lower servants, the upper servants, the Household and the Queen with her chosen guests. A kitchen staff, including a chef, four master-cooks, two assistant cooks, two roasting cooks, two yeomen of the kitchen, sixteen apprentices, as well as bakers, confectioners, pastrymen and some half a dozen kitchen maids, provided menus which the Aga Khan described as long and elaborate:⁴

Course after course, three or four choices of meat, a hot pudding and an iced pudding, a savoury and all kinds of hot-house fruit ... The Queen, in spite of her age, ate and drank heartily - every kind of wine that was offered [she usually drank Scotch whisky, distilled especially for her by John Begg, with Apollinaris, soda or lithia water] and every course, including both hot and iced pudding.5

She preferred plain food, such as boiled chicken and roast beef, haggis and potatoes (twelve acres of these were devoted to their growth at Windsor), to anything exotic, but she liked a good helping and she liked her brown Windsor soup made no longer simply with ham and calves' feet as served to her children in the nursery, but including game, Madeira and shell-fish; and she loved her creme de volatile, her puddings, her cranberry tarts and cream, her chocolate cakes and chocolate biscuits, her 'stodgy trifle of jam and sponge cakes'.⁶ Marie Mallet complained that slow eaters like herself and Mr Gladstone 'never had time to finish even a moderate helping', because the servants, in Lord Ribblesdale's words, had 'a menial trick of depriving us of our plates as soon as the Queen had finished'. The lords-in-waiting, being 'mostly of the deferential breed', did not complain and were, therefore, all the more astounded when one evening a guest did complain. This was Lord Hartington who was in the middle of enjoying some mutton and green peas.

'The Queen could dispose of peas with marvellous skill and dexterity [Lord Ribblesdale said], and had got into conversation with Lord Hartington, thus delaying his own operations. They got on very well together. Though Lord Hartington, like Peel and the Duke of Wellington, had neither small talk nor manners, yet he seemed to me less shy with the Queen than with his neighbours. This may be accounted for, perhaps, by their both being absolutely natural and their both being in no sort of doubt about their positions.

'Well, anyhow, in the full current of their conversation the mutton was taken away from him. He stopped in the middle of a sentence in time to arrest the scarlet-clad marauder: "Here bring that back!"'

The members of the Household held their breath, but when Lord Ribblesdale looked up at the Queen he saw that she was amused. 'I knew this,' he said, 'by one of the rare smiles, as different as possible to the civil variety which, overtired, uninterested or thinking about something else, she contributed to the conventional observations of her visitors.'⁷

Mrs Mallet confirmed the observation of others that the atmosphere at the dinner table - as Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman had found - was dependent upon the Queen's mood. Sometimes her conversation would take the form of a rigorous cross-examination; at others she was very gloomy and silent, especially when an uncongenial Minister was in attendance such as Charles Ritchie, at one time Home Secretary, a tall, dark Scotsman whom Marie Mallet described as being 'very vulgar and unrefined in all his ways, in short he has not the manners of a gentleman. He lifts up his loud voice at dinner and shouts under her very nose and last night I heard him deliver a lecture on Socialism to Her Majesty which I could perceive was not relished.'⁸

Dinners were equally uncomfortable occasions when members of the Queen's Household or family died. On the occasion of the death of her lady-in-waiting, Lady Ely, she came into the dining room in deepest mourning and 'hardly uttered';[lxxvi]⁹ and when, again at dinner, she heard of the death of Prince Henry of Battenberg, who had gone out to serve in South Africa, she 'hardly uttered' throughout the meal.

Yet normally in these last years she was more often cheerful and talkative than gloomy and silent. The Aga Khan found the 'facility and clarity' of her conversation 'astonishing'. 'She had an odd accent,' he added, making a comment not endorsed by others, 'a mixture of Scotch and German' with 'the German conversational trick of interjecting "so" pronounced "tzo" into her remarks'.[lxxvii]¹⁰

Often she would laugh until the tears rolled down her cheeks. The letters which Marie Mallet wrote to her mother and her husband contain many references to the Queen's spontaneous and sometimes uproarious laughter when at a 'hen dinner' with her ladies: 'the Queen laughed very much'; 'the Queen laughed more than ever'; 'she was immensely amused and roared with laughter, her whole face changing and lighting up in a wonderful way'; 'she was very funny at the evening concert... in excellent spirits and full of jokes'.¹¹

Another of her maids-of-honour, Susan Baring, also wrote of the Queen's good humour during these ladies' dinners: 'It was rather amusing the Queen doing puppets of the German ladies, too killing!!'¹²

The celebrated comedian, J. L. Toole, who was well known for his imitation of the Queen, was once invited to Windsor and, after dinner, was summoned by Her Majesty who commanded him, 'Now, Mr Toole, imitate me.' Toole, aghast, demurred, but the Queen persisted. After the performance she was 'for a little while silent and serious, but then began to laugh, gently at first, and then more and more heartily. At last Her Majesty said, "Mr Toole that was very clever, and very, very funny, and you must promise me you will never, never do it again."'¹³

The Queen also still much enjoyed the theatricals and tableaux vivants performed by members of her family and Household, all the more so when Henry Ponsonby was no longer there to spoil them by having neither the time nor the inclination to learn his part.

The Queen did not take part herself. Yet, although Alick Yorke was nominally the director of most productions, she dominated the proceedings, not only choosing the play but attending the rehearsals, altering and censoring the dialogue, acting as costume adviser, supervising the making and painting of the scenery, and seeing to it that members of her immediate family were given all the leading parts.¹⁴ On the evening of the performance she would enter after the rest of the audience and take up her position 'a little forward from them in a low armchair', so one of her servants recorded. 'A footstool is placed before her, and a small table holds her fan, opera-glasses, programme and book of the words. The applause is always led by the Queen, who taps either her hand or table with her fan.' She led the laughter as well as the applause; and frequently, to the great annoyance of the performers, she would explain the plot to her neighbours in an all too audible voice during the course of the production.¹⁵

When professional performances were staged she did not hesitate to censor the script if she considered it too outre. She made no objection to the Covent Garden production of Carmen; but when in 1893 the cast from the Lyceum of Henry Irving's production of Tennyson's tragedy Becket was summoned to Windsor she expressed misgivings to Ponsonby:

The Queen is rather alarmed at hearing from the pce of Wales & pce George that there is some very strong language (disagreeable & coarse rather) in Becket wh must be somewhat changed for performance here ... Prss Louise says that some scenes or perhaps one are very awkward. What can be done?

The Pr of Wales thought Sir Henry shd see & speak to Irving.

The Queen hates anything of that sort.16

In the event 'Irving acted well and with much dignity, but his enunciation is not very distinct, especially when he gets excited. Ellen Terry as "Rosamund" was perfect, so graceful and full of feeling and so young-looking in her lovely light dress, quite wonderfully so, for she is forty-six! '¹⁷

As well as performances of plays by professional companies and amateur theatricals, there were also concerts - once Ignacy Paderewski played for her at Windsor 'quite marvellously', proving himself 'quite equal to Rubinstein', and in 1898 she was 'simply enchanted' by a performance of Wagner's Lohengrin, 'so poetic, so dramatic ... full of sadness, pathos and tenderness, a most glorious composition';¹⁸ and she was equally delighted by a performance of Cavalleria rusticana 'by a young Italian composer of the name of Mascagni'. It was 'a great success,' she said. 'I loved the music, which is so melodious, and characteristically Italian.'¹⁹ She was later heard humming the 'wonderfully descriptive and plaintive airs' to herself.²⁰

From time to time lectures were given in the evening. A 'very interesting lecture' was, for instance, given in September 1872 by the explorer and journalist, Henry Morton Stanley, 'a determined, ugly, little man -with a strong American twang', as the Queen described him.²¹ Also, very occasionally, the furniture in the drawing room was pushed back and the Queen, despite her lameness, enjoyed a 'nice little impromptu dance, Curtis's band being so entrainant'. 'We had a quadrille, in which I danced with Eddy!!' she wrote of one such impromptu dance in October 1890. 'It did quite well, then followed some waltzes and polkas.'²²

One evening at the Villa Clara in Baveno the Queen, having asked William Jenner how he had spent his day, was amused to be told that he and Fräulein Bauer, Princess Beatrice's ugly and formidably straitlaced German governess, had joined a party climbing the Rigi. They had been mistaken for man and wife and, on this erroneous understanding, had been required to make the descent squashed closely together in a chair. Imagining the doctor and the governess thus trapped, everyone tried not to laugh until Princess Louise, then nineteen, could not control herself any longer and everyone else then burst into laughter. 'The tears ran down my cheeks,' Henry Ponsonby commented, 'which set off the Queen. I never saw her laugh so much.' When Lady Churchill innocently enquired, 'Did you find it comfortable?' the laughter exploded once more. 'My laugh was at Jenner stuffing his napkin over his mouth to stop himself, at Mary Bids [Lady Biddulph] shaking and speechless at my side and at Bids's [Sir Thomas Biddulph's] solemn face.'²³

There was also loud laughter when the Queen was told by Lord Dufferin of a naive American who asked his English hostess, 'How old are you? How long have you been married? I should like to see your nuptial bed.' Amused as she was, the Queen raised her napkin to protect Princess Beatrice and the maids-of-honour who were sitting on the other side of the table.²⁴

Upon a later hilarious occasion, this time at luncheon, an old, deaf, garrulous Admiral was telling the Queen at inordinate length how a ship which had sunk off the south coast had been raised and towed into Portsmouth. Anxious to stop the Admiral's flow of boring detail about this salvage operation, the Queen tried to change the subject by asking him about his sister. Mishearing her, the ancient mariner replied, 'Well, Ma'am, I am going to have her turned over, take a good look at her bottom and have it scraped.' As the footmen in attendance withdrew behind a screen, the Queen 'put down her knife and fork, hid her face in her handkerchief and shook and heaved with laughter until the tears rolled down her face'.[lxxviii]

One evening in April 1888 she 'laughed incessantly and was full of all the interesting people she had seen [in Berlin]'. At subsequent Ladies' Dinners she was described as talking very freely, giving her opinions 'in a most decided and amusing manner', being altogether 'so amusing', reminiscing happily about the boredom she had experienced during a performance of Handel's 'Messiah' at York Minster when she was sixteen, roaring with laughter at Bernard Mallet's description of his wife's attempting to paint at Bruges where boys had spat at her canvas and thrown stones at her, laughing heartily at dinner again three days later, and then being 'most cheerful' and in 'excellent spirits' at a subsequent dinner, 'making jokes about her age [78] and saying she felt quite young and that had it not been for an unfortunate accident she would have been running about still'.²⁵

Nor were larger, more formal dinners always as strained as some guests found them when the Queen was in a disgruntled mood, unhappy or preoccupied. Reginald Brett, the Secretary of the Office of Works, son and heir of the first Lord Esher, told his son of a dinner in 1897:

It was really quite an amusing and pleasant dinner for me. I was two off the Queen, between the Duchess of Connaught and the young Duchess of Hesse [the Duke of Edinburgh's daughter, Victoria Melita] who is called 'Duckie' ... She was very shy at first, but we got on capitally later, and by the end of dinner there was quite a rag.

The Queen was extraordinarily vivacious, full of smiles and chaff - a most wonderful thing.26

A few months later Brett, who had by then become Lord Esher on his father's death, was again a guest of the Queen at a dinner 'which went off well':

The Queen was in good spirits and talked to me a good deal at dinner and afterwards. I was next but one to her, between Princess Beatrice and Lady Dudley. The latter looked very well, stately and young to be the mother of all those Wards! [seven of them]. A telegram [containing disturbing news about the Boer war] came at dinner and the Queen turned quite pale ... She asked me if I had seen her new portrait by Angeli, and, when I said no, had it sent for into the corridor. It is wonderfully like.[lxxix]27

After dinner in these later years the lady guests would play patience or whist while the men stood about 'at the end of the room in a very stiff way and very tiring to themselves', 'whispering discreetly'. Sometimes they would join the card games; but, according to Frederick Ponsonby, this activity was never very enjoyable, the packs 'usually being one card short', and 'no one having the least knowledge' of the rules of the game being played. Moreover, 'Lord Stafford, who was an equerry, had always been told that the danger of card-playing was that unscrupulous people looked over one's hand, and therefore held his hands so tightly under his chin that it took him nearly two whole minutes to find a card. Of course, no smoking was allowed.'²⁸

The Queen, meanwhile, would sit in her chair, sipping coffee from a cup whose saucer was held by a page, occasionally asking someone to be brought up to speak to her and giving that 'curious, nervous laugh' of hers when a person whom she did not know very well was presented. 'About eleven the [card games] stop,' Lady Lytton recorded in 1896, 'and looks are sent across to the Queen ... When she takes her stick, as if by magic the servants outside know it and open the door and [an Indian servant] ... glides in, seizes the Queen's arm and she rises slowly, but still darts across the room when walking. At the door the Princes come and kiss her hand and then the Queen goes away and the Princesses follow. One feels very idiotic after this, and we either leave the drawing-room direct, or pass through the billiard-room where the Gentlemen of the Household remain.'²⁹

Chapter 62 BOOKS

One evening at Balmoral when the Empress Frederick was staying there the conversation at dinner turned to the novels of Marie Corelli which the Queen, like Mr Gladstone, much admired, maintaining that their author would rank as one of the greatest writers of her time. Her daughter, however, contended that they were utter tripe and, in a loud voice, sought support for this opinion from Frederick Ponsonby who was sitting at the far end of the table and had not heard the opinions expressed so far. Ponsonby contended that, while 'her books undoubtedly had a large sale, the secret of her popularity was that her writings appealed to the semi-educated. Whereupon the Empress clapped her hands and the subject dropped with startling suddenness. '¹

Although she was by no means intellectual, the Queen was far from being as ill-read as was often supposed: Frederick Ponsonby averred that her taste in literature was 'said to be deplorable' and that 'she never liked the works of the great authors'. Yet her letters and journal entries contain numerous references to worthwhile books she had read, many of which she claimed to have admired or enjoyed.

She had been warned against reading novels as a girl; and in later life she confessed to feeling rather guilty when reading fiction. 'Read in [Bulwer Lytton's] Eugene Aram for some time while my hair was doing,' she had recorded in her diary in December 1838, 'and finished it; beautifully written and fearfully interesting as it is, I am glad I have finished it, for I never feel quite at ease or at home when I am reading a Novel, and therefore was really glad to go on to Guizot's Revolution de l'Angleterre.' She had already read Madame de Sevigne's letters, some of Racine's tragedies and Sully's memoirs. According to Lady Holland she told Guizot in March 1840 with what pleasure she had read his book. It was, so Lady Holland said, repeating a common fallacy, 'really one of the few books since her accession, & Hallam's [Constitutional History of Englandl] is the other, that she has read through'.²

Discouraged as she had been by her mother from reading novels, however, she confessed to having found James Fennimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans 'very interesting', though 'very horrible'; and had greatly enjoyed Sir Walter Scott's The Bride of Lammermoor which she had read aloud to Lehzen - there were later discovered to be no fewer than twelve copies of Scott's Rob Roy at Balmoral and thirty-two copies of his Lady of the Lake. As a child she had considered Scott her 'beau ideal of a Poet'; and, in later life, she told Lady Lytton that of all the poets whose work she liked, Scott was still her favourite.

Before her marriage she had also been impressed by George Crabbe and by Washington Irving's The Conquest of Granada; and, unlike Lord Melbourne, she had found Dickens's Oliver Twist 'too interesting'. Later she noted having finished Jane Eyre (which was 'intensely interesting, really a wonderful book, so powerfully and admirably written'), Caroline Lamb's Glenarvon and Dumas's Les Trois Mousquetaires as well as Northanger Abbey, Adam Bede ('such knowledge of human nature, such truth in the characters', a book which she was 'delighted to read a second time' since she liked 'to trace a likeness to the dear Highlanders in Adam'), The Mill on the Floss ('wonderful and painful'), Scenes of Clerical Life ('admirable'), Uncle Tom's Cabin, Disraeli's Coningsby and his Endymion,[lxxx] Charles Kingsley's Hypathia, Theodore Mugge's Afrija ('so intensely interesting, so poetical and romantic') and Charlotte M. Yonge's Heartsease. She began to read Trollope's Barchester Towers to her husband; but she did not like doing so: there was 'not enough romance in it' and 'the people she could not interest herself in'. She preferred Fanny Burney's Diary and Letters, Mrs Gaskell's life of Charlotte Bronte, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's verse - 'poetry,' she said, 'I like in all shapes', though Mrs Browning's Aurora Leigh was 'very strange', 'at times dreadfully coarse' and 'an incredible book for a lady to have written'; while Samuel Johnson's poetry she found 'very hard'. Lord Melbourne agreed with her. 'Hang it,' he said. 'It's as hard as Greek.' 'I am very fond of Burns's poems,' she declared unsurprisingly. 'They are so poetical - so simple in their dear Scotch tongue, which is so full of poetry.'

She was particularly taken with Alice in Wonderland by Prince Leopold's friend, the Revd Charles Dodgson, the eccentric young mathematical lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford who wrote under the name of Lewis Carroll. She told him so and said that she looked forward to reading others of his books. He sent her a volume which had been published five years earlier, Syllabus of Plane Algebraical Geometry.

Under Prince Albert's tutelage the Queen had begun to read fewer novels and more instructive works of non-fiction, such as Macaulay's History of England from the Accession of James II and Bishop Butler's Analogy of Religion. But after the Prince's death she was reluctant to find time to trouble herself with history and biography, though she did tackle Charles Kingsley: His Letters and Memories of his Life by his Wife which she found 'full of [her] sort of interest'.³ And one day she spoke to Marie Mallet about A. J. Balfour's The Foundations of Belief. 'I must read some of it,' she said, 'but they tell me it is very difficult. I know it is beyond me. Have you read it?'

'Only partly Your Majesty.'

'Well, you must find some bit not too hard to read to me.'⁴

Nor did she much care for accounts of contemporary affairs. King-lake's Invasion of the Crimea she thought 'very scurrilous';⁵ and she described With Kitchener to Khartoum by the Daily Mail journalist, George Warrington Steevens, 'flippant', and she stopped Mrs Mallet's reading before she had finished it. She did, however, approve of the Spectator, 'a very sensible paper' and 'no longer as radical as it used to be'.⁶

But her greatest pleasure in her old age was in reading novels or rather in listening to novels being read to her. She expressed a particular enthusiasm for the works of Pauline Craven, a once highly popular novelist, the daughter of French emigres, whom, so she told Mrs Mallet, she 'admired more than anyone', her novel Recit d'une Soeur 'above all'. She invited Mrs Craven to Osborne and asked her to send her all her works - there were a great number of them - after having written her name in all of them.⁷

She also much admired the now little-read American writer Francis Marion Crawford. She enjoyed his Jaquissara 'immensely' and, even more, his Corleone, a novel set in Rome which Marie Mallet read to her in 1898 not long after it had been published. 'I have nearly finished reading Corleone to the Queen,' Mrs Mallet told her husband, 'and she has been as much thrilled by the story as if she were a girl of 18! It is quite a treat to read to anyone so keen and I have enjoyed it immensely.'⁸

Chapter 63 BOOKMEN

Having read and greatly admired Lord Tennyson's In Memoriam - although his Holy Grail had left her 'quite bewildered'¹ - the Queen asked to meet the poet who lived some fifteen miles from Osborne. Tennyson was reluctant to go: he was shy, he said, and would not know how to conduct himself. But on 14 April 1862, four months after the Prince Consort's death, he did go, taking his two sons and Benjamin Jowett, Fellow of Balliol, with him; and the visit was a success. The Queen described Tennyson as being 'very peculiar looking, tall, dark, with a fine head, long black flowing hair and a beard - oddly dressed but there is no affectation about him.' They talked about Prince Albert, of course; and Tennyson said he would have made a great king. Tears, gratifyingly, came into his eyes. The Queen asked him if there was anything she could do for him. He said there was nothing; but he would be grateful if she would shake his sons by the hand: the gesture might 'keep them loyal in the troublous times to come'.²

A meeting with the American poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, was not so successful. The Queen made a few complimentary remarks to which Longfellow replied that he was surprised to find himself so well known in England. 'Oh, I assure you, Mr Longfellow,' the Queen said, according to the poet's own account, 'you are very well known. All my servants read you.' 'Sometimes,' said Longfellow, 'I will wake up in the night and wonder if it was a deliberate slight.' Oscar Wilde, to whom Longfellow related this story, observed afterwards that it was 'the rebuke of Majesty to the vanity of the poet'.³ The Queen also expressed a wish to meet Charles Dickens who, as a young man, had plagued his friends with wild protestations that he had fallen madly in love with the 21-year-old Queen, whose features bore more than a passing resemblance to those of his beloved sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth. He would die for Victoria, he wrote in a series of letters which gave rise to rumours that he had actually become demented. He said that he had wandered forlornly about the grounds of Windsor Castle and felt 'so heartbroken at the glowing windows of the royal bedchamber that he had cast himself down in the mud of the Long Walk'. He wished to be embalmed and 'kept on top of the triumphal arch of Buckingham Palace when she [was] in town, and on the north-east turret of the Round Tower when she [was] at Windsor'.⁴

Since then, at the time of the 1848 uprisings on the Continent, Dickens had declared himself a republican; but this had not lessened his pleasure at having the Queen in the audience at his production of a charity performance of Every Man in his Humour at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket and at a subsequent performance at Devonshire House where one of the actors, who was required by the script to smoke a pipe, was, at Dickens's insistence, merely to pretend to do so, since the Queen, as he said, 'couldn't bear tobacco'.

Having led the applause at this performance - in which, she noted in her journal, 'Dickens (the celebrated author) acted admirably' - she was anxious to see a subsequent production of Wilkie Collins's The Frozen Deep and offered Dickens a room at Buckingham Palace for this purpose. Dickens declined the offer, however, maintaining that, since his daughters had not been presented at Court, he did not want them to appear at Buckingham Palace for the first time as actresses. Dickens also refused to appear before the Queen as she asked him to do, after a performance of the play specially put on for her at the Gallery of Illustration in Regent Street.

'My gracious Sovereign,' Dickens wrote to his friend, John Forster, explaining his reasons for disobeying this royal command, 'was so pleased [with the performance] that she sent round begging me to go round and see her and accept her thanks. I replied that I was in my Farce dress, and must beg to be excused. Whereupon she sent again, saying that the dress "could not be so ridiculous as that", and repeating the request. I sent my duty in reply, but again hoped her Majesty would excuse me pre- senting myself in a costume and appearance that were not my own.'

It was, therefore, not until March 1870, shortly before his death, that Dickens appeared before the Queen at Buckingham Palace. Although he was unwell and had a swollen foot, the Queen did not break with convention by asking him to sit down. She herself remained standing, leaning over the back of a sofa for the hour and a half that the interview lasted.[lxxxi] She said that she had never been able to attend one of his readings from his works, hinting that he might give her a private performance. Some time before she had expressed a wish for a private reading from A Christmas Carol. He had regretted that he could not do so then; and now, giving the same excuse, he said that a mixed audience was essential for the reading's success. They spoke then of his American tour, and of such mundane matters as the servant problem and the high cost of food, education and Lincoln's dream before his assassination. As he prepared to leave she gave him a copy of her Journal of Our Life in the Highlands, inscribed 'from the humblest of writers to one of the greatest', and asked him for a set of his own works. She would like them, she said, that afternoon. At this he demurred: he would like to give her a special set, properly bound.

The Queen found him 'very agreeable, with a pleasant voice and manner'. He thought her 'strangely shy', so he told his sister-in-law, Georgina, 'and like a girl in manner'.⁵

Chapter 64 FAILING HEALTH

Towards the end of July 1900 the Queen received the news that her second son, Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, who had succeeded his uncle as Duke of Coburg seven years before, had died at the Rosenau. An alcoholic, he had been suffering from cancer of the tongue and for some time had been estranged from his wife whom he blamed for the death of their son, 'Young Affie', an unsatisfactory young man who had contracted syphilis and, suffering from 'nervous depression', had shot himself after a furious quarrel with his mother. The Queen felt 'terribly shaken and broken' on hearing of her 'poor darling' second son's death, and at first she 'could not realize the dreadful fact'. Following upon the deaths of her youngest son, Prince Leopold, of Princess Alice's little daughter, May, and of Princess Alice herself, who died of diphtheria at the age of thirty-five on 14 December 1878, the seventeenth anniversary of her father's death - a lamentable loss which occasioned a letter from her eldest sister to their mother of thirty-nine pages[lxxxii] - the Duke of Edinburgh's death was the loss of a 'third grown-up child' which the Queen had had to bear. She had also lost 'three very dear sons-in-law' - Vicky's husband, Fritz, Beatrice's husband, Prince Henry of Battenberg ('beloved, noble "Liko"') who had died of malaria while serving in the Ashanti expedition in 1896 - 'causing such grief in the house', the Queen 'crying and sobbing much'[lxxxiii] - and Princess Alice's widower, Louis IV, Grand Duke of Hesse, 'so dear and joyous - so loving and so young for his age', who had died after suffering a stroke in 1892. It was 'hard at eighty-one' to have to accept yet another death in the family.

It was all the harder to accept the death of the 'dear, lovable' Louis of Hesse, since it had come within a matter of weeks of that of the Prince of Wales's son and heir. Prince Albert Victor (Prince Eddy), Duke of Clarence, had died at Sandringham in January, six days after his twenty-eighth birthday, while his father was still recovering from his involvement in a scandalous court case in which it was revealed that he had been gambling at baccarat at Tranby Croft, a country house in Yorkshire, with a man accused of cheating. 'Poor poor parents,' lamented the Queen who had expressed the hope that the Tranby Croft case would prove a salutary 'shock to Society'. 'Poor, poor parents ... A tragedy too dreadful for words ... The Queen's impulse yesterday was to go to Sandringham but Dr Reid and all - said she must not run the risk of cold & fatigue etc.... Poor May to have her whole bright future to be merely a dream.'¹

In fact 'poor May', daughter of Francis, Duke of Teck, was not really to be pitied. Her marriage to Prince Eddy had been due to take place on 27 February that year and no one who knew the young man could suppose he would have made a good husband. He was pleasant enough, the Duke of Cambridge conceded, but 'an inveterate and incurable dawdler, never ready, never there'.² He was also weak-willed and impressionable, leading what the Queen had described in a letter to the young man's mother as a 'dissipated' life, a comment which prompted the Prince of Wales's Private Secretary, Sir Francis Knollys, to write to Sir Henry Ponsonby, 'I ask again who it is tells the Queen these things?' There was so little that escaped her notice. Prince Eddy had wanted to marry Princess Helene d'Orleans, an attractive warm-hearted girl. Although she was a Roman Catholic whose father, the Comte de Paris, disapproved of the match, the Princess of Wales undertook to help her son overcome the difficulties which stood in the way of it. Rightly supposing that, as Princess Helene was prepared to renounce her religion, Queen Victoria's affection for Prince Eddy, and the romantic appeal of young lovers in distress, would lead her to support a marriage which prudence frowned upon, the Princess of Wales urged her son to go to see his grandmother at Balmoral.³ He quailed at the prospect of such an interview. 'You can imagine what a thing to go through,' he told his brother, George, 'and I did not at all relish the idea ... I naturally expected that grandmama would be furious at the idea, and say it was quite impossible etc. But instead of that she was very nice about it and promised to help us as much as possible, which she is now doing ... I believe what pleased her most was my taking Helene into her, and saying we had arranged it entirely between ourselves without consulting our parents first. This as you know was not quite true but she believed it all and was quite pleased.'⁴

The Comte de Paris, however, proved resolute in opposition to his daughter marrying a Protestant young man of whom he had heard no good reports; and Prince Eddy was, therefore, compelled to look elsewhere for a bride. Having fallen in love with Lady Sybil St Clair Erskine and having failed to win her also, he had complaisantly agreed to marry the far more suitable Princess May of Teck, who was 'quiet and reserved' in the Queen's opinion, 'the reverse of oberflachlich [superficial]' and with 'such good manners wh. in the present day [were] not too frequent'.

Greatly distressed by Prince Eddy's death before this marriage could take place, his father made the highly extravagant claim that such a tragedy had 'never before occurred in the annals' of their family. Yet he knew in his heart that his lethargic and dandiacal elder son, whose mind, as his tutor had once put it, was 'at all times in an abnormally dormant condition', had been hopelessly ill-qualified for the position for which his birth had destined him and that his younger brother, Prince George, the future King George V, who obligingly agreed to marry Princess May in his brother's place, was far better suited to kingship. He was also, in his grandmother's opinion, 'so nice, sensible, & truly right-minded, & so anxious to improve himself.'[lxxxiv]

In the years before and after Prince Eddy's death, the Queen had to mourn the loss of several other members of her family, as well as dear friends and ladies and gentlemen of her Household. General Grey and Sir James Clark had both died in 1870. Lady Augusta Stanley had died, five years before her husband, in 1876. Two years later, to what she said was her 'profoundest grief, Sir Thomas Biddulph contracted a fatal illness in Scotland. Gerald Wellesley, Dean of Windsor, followed Dean Stanley to the grave in 1882. 'Dear kind' Sir Henry Ponsonby never recovered from the paralytic stroke which incapacitated him in 1895. Sir William Jenner, whose ill health necessitated his retirement in 1890, died eight years later. Both Prince Alexander, 'Sandro', of Battenberg and the Prince Consort's brother, Ernest, Duke of Coburg, died in 1893; Augusta, the old Duchess of Cambridge in 1889, 'the last one gone,' as the Queen commented, 'who had a right to call me Victoria!' One of her favourite grandsons, Princess Helena's elder son, Christian Victor, Prince of Schles-wig-Holstein, died in 1900 of enteric fever while serving with the 60th Rifles in South Africa.

'I could not believe it,' she wrote of this last death. 'It seemed too dreadful and heart-breaking, this dear, excellent, gallant boy, beloved by all, such a good as well as a brave and capable officer, gone.' She was 'dreadfully shaken and upset' as her ladies testified. Lady Lytton recalled the tears pouring down her cheeks as she squeezed her hand, silently acknowledging her sympathy; and Marie Mallet told her husband:

Words fail me to describe the pall of sorrow that hangs over this house [Balmoral], the Queen is quite exhausted by her grief and that dear unselfish Princess Thora [Prince Christian Victor's sister] just heart-broken ... When the Queen breaks down and draws me close to her and lets me stroke her dear hand I quite forget she is far above me and only realize she is a sorrowing woman who clings to human sympathy and hungers for all that can be given on such occasions. I feel thankful for my unreserved nature and power of showing what I feel, for I believe it is a comfort to her, just a little ... She is quite angelic, and does her best to keep up, but the effort is very great ... The curious thing is that she said to me, 'After the Prince Consort's death I wished to die, but now I wish to live and do what I can for my country and those I love.' Do not repeat this but it is a very remarkable utterance for a woman of eighty-two, and this is not the first time she has made the same remark.5

Mrs Mallet was worried by the deleterious effect the Queen's sorrow might have upon her health which was naturally not as robust as it had been, particularly in very hot weather. A stifling summer's day was 'quite dreadful for me, who love cold,' she had said years before, '& am always poorly & stupified in hot weather'. From the early 1880s she had been troubled with rheumatism in her legs, a complaint which Princess Louise, always ready with eccentric prescriptions, proposed should be treated by boiling the painful members in whisky every night. Temporarily the Queen had lost the use of her legs altogether in the emotional distress caused by the death of John Brown, as she had also done when the Prince Consort died. Then, as her eyesight began to fail, she also complained in frequent notes to Dr Reid of sciatica, neuralgic headaches, a husky voice, pain between her shoulders and in her hip, lumbago, gastric pain, nausea, trouble with her false teeth, occasional indigestion and what, in her hypochondriacal way, she supposed was heart disease.⁶ Additionally, she suffered from bouts of insomnia for which she was prescribed doses of chloral, Dover's powder, ammonium bromide and tincture of henbane.[lxxxv]

After grumbling about her very bad night [Reid recorded in one of many such comments] she said that perhaps after all she had more sleep than she thought, as, except once, she did not think she remained awake longer than five or six minutes at a time! Every time she wakes, even for a few minutes, she rings for her maids, who of course don't like it, and naturally call the night a 'bad' one. She has got into the habit of waking up at night, and I fear it may not be easy to break this habit. Meantime I shall go on with Bromide and Henbane, and give no opium.7

Fussy as she was about her health, and regularly as she called upon her doctors for treatment, any reports that she was ill annoyed her intensely; and she had been known in her old age to go out of her way to fulfil some public duty, even coming down from Balmoral to do so, rather than allow it to be supposed that she was really unwell. She could not, however, disguise the fact that she was becoming increasingly lame: she found it more and more difficult, and in the end impossible, to walk without a stick or the help of someone's arm, and eventually she took to being wheeled about in a chair.

Yet she did not allow her infirmities to interfere with her enjoyment of life; nor did they prevent her from contriving to seem almost agile when making an appearance in public. As late as the summer of 1900, at a garden party at Buckingham Palace, the 'dear old lady' was described by Lady Monkswell as being 'vivacious'. She 'wagged her head about and looked this way and that through her spectacles'. Lady Monkswell was 'sure nothing escaped her'. 'When I thought of her immense age I felt I ought to kneel as she passed ... Off she went back to Windsor - we heard the crowd cheering her as she drove up Constitution Hill. I was glad to notice that although she wanted a good deal of help she was able to walk for herself and was not carried.'⁸

Marie Mallet's letters are full of references to the Queen's cheerfulness and vivacity in these last years of her life. But by the end of the century her general health had begun seriously to fail. On coming into waiting at Osborne in February 1900, Marie Mallet's heart sank since Her Majesty looked 'so much older and feebler'. She had a bad cough and could not be kept awake when her ladies read to her in the evenings, rustle the pages, wriggle in their chairs, and drop their fans as they would. Also her digestion was becoming 'defective after so many years of hard labour'. 'If she would follow a diet and live on Benger's Food and chicken all would be well,' Mrs Mallet thought. 'But she clings to roast beef and ices! And what can you then expect? Sir James [Reid] has at last persuaded her to try Bengers and she likes it and now to his horror, instead of substituting it for other foods she adds it to her already copious meals ... And of course when she devours a huge chocolate ice followed by a couple of apricots washed down with iced water as she did last night [25 July 1900] she ought to expect a dig from the indigestion fiend.'⁹

When she returned to Balmoral for a further spell of waiting, towards the end of October 1900, Mrs Mallet found the Queen looking 'very old and feeble'. 'She has grown very thin,' she wrote, 'and there is a distressing look of pain and weariness on her face ... She is far from well ... and yesterday we had thick fog worthy of London, which made her perfectly miserable.'¹⁰

On her return to Windsor from a 'wretchedly gloomy and dark Balmoral' in November, she was a little better but a large luncheon on the 14th and the need to shout to make herself heard by the deaf Princess of Wales exhausted her, and she was 'in pain and very feeble ... She resents being treated as an invalid and as soon as she feels a tiny bit better she overtires herself and collapses.' Marie Mallet's husband, Bernard, who was at Windsor that month, feared that 'it must be the beginning of the end'.

The Queen's brief entries in her journal this month and the next make pathetic reading:

Felt very poorly and wretched, as I have done all the last days. My appetite is completely gone, and I have great difficulty in eating anything [5 November] ... I still have disgust for all food [9 November] ... Had a shocking night... pain kept me awake. Felt very tired and unwell when I got up, and was not able to go to church, to my great disappointment [11 November] ... Had a very restless night, with a good deal of pain. Got up very late, and when I did felt so tired I could do nothing, and slept on the sofa [28 November] ... After a very wretched night, I passed a very miserable day, and could neither go out nor leave my room [2 December] ... Saw Sir Francis Laking [who] encouraged me by saying he thought I should in time get over this unpleasant dislike of food and squeamishness ... and recommended my taking a little milk and whisky several times a day [11 December] ... Had a very bad night and scarcely slept at all [18 December].11

That day the Queen left Windsor for the last time; but for once she was not looking forward to Christmas at Osborne. She was sleeping more fitfully than ever, despite the large doses of chloral she took with her Bengers; and she felt guilty that her unconscionable sleepiness in the daytime prevented her from attending properly to her work and corre spondence. On Christmas Eve she went into the Durbar Room where the Christmas tree was traditionally kept according to the Prince Consort's wishes; but her eyes were so dim she could scarcely see the candles. 'I feel so very melancholy,' she wrote, 'as I see so very badly.' The next day, Christmas Day, she learned with great distress that her dear friend Lady Churchill, her companion in those happy, long-gone holidays in Scotland and for almost fifty years a most valued member of her Household, had died of heart failure in the night. 'The loss to me,' she said miserably, 'is not to be told ... and that it should happen here is too sad.'¹²

Chapter 65 DEATH

'Another year begun,' the Queen's first diary entry for 1901 recorded, '& I am feeling so weak and unwell that I enter upon it sadly.' A fortnight later her journal came to a close. The day after the last entry was written she saw Field-Marshal Lord Roberts, Wolseley's successor as Commander-in-Chief, and she talked to him about the war in South Africa which, like the strain of her visit to Ireland the previous year, had, so she believed, been largely responsible for her present ill health. She had conferred the Order of the Garter on Lord Roberts the week before and he had then observed how frail and ill she looked. On this later occasion she spoke to him for an hour; but she was far from as incisive as she usually was. The day before Reid had described her as being 'rather childish and apathetic'. On 16 January he reported:

The Queen had rather a disturbed night, and was very drowsy all forenoon, and disinclined to get up, although she kept saying in a semi-confused way that she must get up. I saw her asleep in bed in the forenoon, as I was rather anxious about her, and the maids said she was too drowsy to notice me. This was the first time I had ever seen the Queen when she was in bed. She was lying on her right side huddled up and I was struck by how small she appeared ... She did not get up till 6 p.m. when she had a dress loosely fastened round her and was wheeled into the sitting-room ... At 7.30 I saw her and she was dazed, confused and her speech was affected.1

The next day Reid concluded that the Queen had had a slight stroke. On Saturday 19 January it was publicly announced that Her Majesty had not lately been in her usual health. Her children had been summoned. So had Randall Davidson who had recently been translated from Rochester to the bishopric of Winchester; and, in case his feelings were hurt, the Queen suggested that the Rector of Whippingham should also be sent for. Without any encouragement from his family in England, the Kaiser left for Osborne as soon as he heard how ill his grandmother was.

Early on Monday morning she asked the doctor, 'Am I better at all? I have been very ill.'

When he assured her she was, indeed, better, she said, 'Then may I have Turi?'

The small Pomeranian dog was placed on her bed; but he did not like it there and jumped to the ground. The Queen appeared not to notice his departure; and not long afterwards she lost consciousness. Intermittently she regained it later and when the Prince of Wales approached her bed and bent over her she recognized him and said, 'Bertie.' But when Sir James Reid returned to her bedside, she seemed to think it was her son and she kissed the doctor's hand repeatedly. Mrs Tuck, her chief dresser, realizing her confusion, asked her 'if she still wanted the Prince of Wales, and she said, "Yes". The Prince returned to her bedside and spoke to her and she said to him, "Kiss my face."'

When the doctor came back into the room, she smiled repeatedly when she heard his voice and assured him that she was ready to listen to his advice. 'I will do anything you like,' she said. 'She kept looking at me,' Reid wrote, 'and frequently gasped, "I'm very ill", and I each time replied "Your Majesty will soon be better."'

At some point Princess Louise heard her mother say, 'I don't want to die yet. There are several things I want to arrange.'

When the Kaiser arrived, to everyone's surprise, he behaved with unusual tact and delicacy. 'I had a good deal of talk with the Emperor who was full of touching loyalty to "Grandmama" as he always described her,' Randall Davidson wrote in a memorandum of the Queen's last days. ' "She has been a very great woman [the Kaiser said]. Just think of it: she remembers George HI, and now we are in the Twentieth Century. And all that time what a life she has led. I have never been with her without feeling that she was in every sense my Grandmama and made me love her as such. And yet the minute we began to talk about political things she made me feel we were equals and could speak as Sovereigns. Nobody had such power as she."'²

He said that he would not go into his grandmother's room if her children thought it better that he should not. When he was taken in by the Prince of Wales, he went to the dying woman's bed and placed his good arm around her shoulders; and thus supported, with Reid on her other side, she died at half past six that evening, 22 January, holding a crucifix in her hand.³

'When all was over most of the family shook hands with me and thanked me by the bedside,' Reid recorded, 'and the Kaiser also squeezed my hand in silence. I told the Prince of Wales to close her eyes. Later the Prince said, "You are an honest straightforward Scotchman", and "I shall never forget all you did for the Queen." The Princess [of Wales] cried very much, shook hands and thanked me ... I left the dinner table to help the maids and nurse to arrange the Queen's body.'

In doing so he noticed that she had had a ventral hernia and a prolapse of the uterus, conditions he had not observed until then as, although he had been attending her for twenty years, he had never examined her body and had treated her 'purely through verbal communication'.⁴

The Queen, however, had reposed her implicit trust in him; and, well aware of this, Mrs Tuck had no hesitation in reading to him the paper which the Queen had given to her years before, detailing the actions which were to be taken immediately after her death and before the funeral.

Chapter 66 FUNERAL AND BURIAL

The Queen had always had, as Henry Ponsonby had said and the other members of her Household well knew, a consuming interest in funerals. When the Duke of Clarence died, Dr Reid had advised her not to go to the funeral on the grounds that her health might be affected by such a depressing occasion. 'She replied that she was never depressed at a funeral (!!) In fact she rather lost her temper. '¹

'It is very curious to see how the Queen takes the keenest interest in death and all its horrors,' Marie Mallet had written after a housemaid had died at Grasse. 'Our whole talk had been of coffins and winding sheets.' There was 'a sort of funeral service' for the housemaid in the dining room of the Grand Hotel, the coffin in the middle of the room 'not even screwed down, everyone in evening dress, the servants sobbing; it was too dreadful'. When the coffin was removed to the English church the Queen had required her Household to visit it, then to attend a full funeral service the next day.

Two days later the Queen had taken several members of her Household to Cannes cemetery to visit the tombs of various friends. 'We started soon after 3.30,' Mrs Mallet had written, 'and were not home till ten to seven! The gentlemen went in a separate carriage full to overflowing with wreaths for the favoured tombs.'²

A week after this, various members of an unwilling Household had been required to attend the funeral of an officer of the Chasseurs des Alpes. 'As the Queen really enjoys these melancholy entertainments she determined to see the procession and poor Major Bigge, much to his disgust, was ordered to put on full uniform and attend the ceremony which lasted nearly three hours.' 'It is certainly strange that the Queen should take such deep interest in the merest details of these functions,' Mrs Mallet had added after yet another funeral. 'A cheerful ceremony is always treated with the utmost indifference.' After Prince Henry of Battenberg's death, when there was 'a gloomy little service in honour of the burial day', Mrs Mallet had commented, 'these reiterated memorial services are very trying but I really think the Queen enjoys them.' She had been much concerned with what went into the coffin in addition to the corpse: Prince Henry, who had to be 'dressed in Ashanti uniform', had been required to have 'his rings left on, also a locket round his neck with Princess Beatrice's hair - the crucifix to be put in his hand with a piece of ivy, white heather, and myrtle from the Princess's wedding bouquet, and a small photo of the Princess attached to it'. There were to be 'three coffins, shell, lead, and oak'.³

Not only had the Queen taken great interest in the funerals of members of her family, of friends and acquaintances and even of strangers, she had also concerned herself with the details of the burials of her dogs. When her favourite Scottish sheepdog, Noble, which used to stand guard over her gloves, died at Balmoral, she 'was much upset', said Dr Reid, 'and cried a great deal. She said ... she believes dogs have souls and a future life: and she could not bear to see [Noble's] body, though she would have liked to kiss his head. Kingsley and many people, she says, believe dogs have souls. I had to increase the strength of her sleeping draught.' She sent Reid a note of instructions detailing the manner in which 'the Prince's beloved old dog' had been buried forty-three years before, and requiring that the body of Noble should be treated in a similar manner:

I wish the grave to be bricked. The dear dog to be wrapped up in the box lined with lead and charcoal, placed in it ... I feel as if I could not bring myself to go and choose the spot. Dr Profeit [the factor at Balmoral] would perhaps suggest it. I will then tell Mr Profeit to write to Boehm to get a repetition of his statue of the dear Dog in bronze to be placed over the grave.4

Paying such attention to the burial of her beloved dogs, it was only to be expected that the Queen had carefully planned her own funeral as well as the actions to be taken immediately after her death, giving 'very minute directions' as to what she wanted done. These 'Instructions' had been entrusted to her dressers 'to be always taken about and kept by' whichever one of them might be travelling with her. They included details of what was to be put in her coffin 'some of which none of her family were to see'.

They included rings, chains, bracelets, lockets, shawls, the Prince Consort's dressing gown, a cloak of his which had been embroidered by Princess Alice and a plaster cast of his hand, numerous photographs, her lace wedding veil, and - to be placed in the Queen's left hand - a photograph of John Brown together with a lock of his hair.[lxxxvi]⁵

The funeral, so the Queen instructed, was to be a 'Military Funeral' as befitted the 'Head of the Army', with her coffin on a gun carriage drawn by eight horses. Her detailed instructions also provided for places in the procession being found for the Munshi and her German secretaries. It was to be a white rather than a black funeral: the horses, she insisted, were not to be black.

This stated preference for a white funeral seems to have been either prompted or reinforced by a remark made by Lord Tennyson whom she had taken to see the Mausoleum at Frogmore. She had commented on the bright light which streamed into the interior from the windows. Tennyson replied that this was 'a great point & went on to say that he wished funerals cd be in white'. When he was buried twenty years after this conversation his coffin was covered with a white pall: the Queen wished to follow his example.⁶

Having satisfied himself that the Queen's 'Instructions' about the contents of her coffin had been carried out, and before letting the family know that they could now return to the room, Reid - after helping to cut off the Queen's hair to be put into lockets - placed a bunch of flowers over Queen Victoria's hand to conceal John Brown's photograph.

The mourners then returned to the room; and the Prince of Wales, now King Edward VII, kindly sent for the Munshi so that he too could pay his last respects before the coffin lid was closed. The coffin, covered by a white satin pall, was then carried by a party of sailors down to the dining room, for the time being a mortuary chapel in which the air was heavy with the strong scent of tuberoses and gardenias. By the light of eight immense candles, four soldiers of the Queen's Company, Grenadier Guards, stood with reversed arms at the corners of the coffin which was covered with crimson velvet and ermine and the Queen's diamond-studded crown on a cushion. Above their heads hung a Union Jack which the Kaiser asked if he might keep, afterwards maintaining that it was his most valued possession.

On 1 February the Queen's coffin was taken down to Trinity Pier and across the Solent to Portsmouth in the royal yacht, the Alberta, while minute guns in the attendant warships boomed across the calm waters. The Alberta was followed by the King in the Victoria and Albert, and after that the Kaiser in his yacht. Next morning the coffin, in the care of Lady Lytton, was taken by train to Victoria Station past groups of people, dressed in black, kneeling by the lines as it steamed slowly by, the blinds of its windows drawn.⁷

In London the crowds, which had gathered in the streets to watch the gun carriage bearing the coffin roll by, were also clothed in black. Even the crossing-sweepers had tied bits of black cloth to their brooms. On the coffin stood the Imperial Crown, the orb and sceptre and the collar of the Order of the Garter.

Lady Monkswell was watching the procession from the upper window of a shop near Victoria Station:

The streets were, indeed, a strange sight, thronged with chiefly decent, respectable & middle-aged people, every one in mourning [she wrote]. Even by 9 o'clock there did not seem room for another person on the pavement; they were all quiet & orderly ... We saw all the Kings & Princes riding horses, & the 4 or 5 shut carriages for Queen Alexandra & the Princesses, pass up to the station. A little later came Lord Roberts riding; he was the only person the people thought they might cheer ... I did not concern myself much with whom the horsemen were, as my eyes were fixed so entirely upon the one great object, that, except for the Prince of Wales, now King, & the Kaiser, who rode a magnificent white horse, I saw nothing else & that I could hardly see because my eyes were filled with tears & I felt very shaky ... Then I silently bid her farewell. The people stood uncovered & silent.8

Through streets lined with soldiers, to the sound of muffled drums, minute guns in Hyde Park and the clatter of the horses' hooves, the gun carriage passed slowly by to Paddington, the crowds watching in silence. Four monarchs followed the coffin on horseback, King Edward VII, Kaiser Wilhelm II, King George I of the Hellenes, and King Carlos of Portugal. A fifth King, Leopold II of the Belgians, drove in a carriage. Also in the procession were the German Crown Prince, and the Crown Princes of Rumania, Greece, Denmark, Norway and Sweden and Siam. The Emperor of Austria was represented by the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the Tsar by the Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovitch and the King of Italy by the Duke of Aosta.

As in London, so also in Windsor, crowds of people stood quietly in the icy cold waiting to see the gun carriage drawn by men of the Royal Horse Artillery up the hill from the station to the Castle. They were kept waiting for longer than they had expected because of a mishap which the General Officer Commanding, Royal Artillery was afterwards required to explain to Lord Roberts:

The RHA team had been so long standing at the station in the bitter cold that when the time came to move off, the horses got restless and out of hand and the splinter bar broke and there was almost a serious accident. The King was displeased and several of his suite got excited and did not improve matters.9

Prince Louis of Battenberg, a captain in the Navy and a Personal Aide to Queen Victoria, who was standing next to the coffin, went up to Frederick Ponsonby, who had been placed in charge of the arrangements at Windsor, and said to him, 'If it is impossible to mend the traces you can always get the naval guard of honour to drag the gun-carriage.'

Ponsonby proposed this to the King who agreed; but there were several Royal Artillery officers amongst the Queen's aides-de-camp who were furious that the men of the Royal Horse Artillery should be so ignominiously replaced. Sir Arthur Bigge, an Artillery officer himself, was 'particularly angry', so Ponsonby said; and he 'went off to expostulate with the King, who merely said, "Right or wrong, let [Ponsonby] manage everything; we shall never get on if there are two people giving contradictory orders."'¹⁰

So, using drag ropes, the sailors pulled the gun carriage through the Windsor streets, and up to the Castle's Long Walk towards St George's Chapel where the short funeral service was to take place while cannon fired a salute of eighty-one guns, one for each year of the Queen's life.

So well did the sailors carry out their task that King Edward suggested they should be given the duty of dragging the coffin to its final resting place in the Mausoleum at Frogmore. But Ponsonby demurred: 'the Artillery had been deeply mortified at their failures ... and would be much hurt if sailors took their place again ... The King quite realized they were not to blame ... but he really thought the sailors had been most effective ... I, however, pressed my point and finally he said, "Very well, the gun-carriage will be drawn by the Artillery, but if anything goes wrong I will never speak to you again." '¹¹

Nothing did go wrong. On 4 February the Queen's coffin was carried out of the Albert Memorial Chapel in St George's and, accompanied by her family, it was taken to the Mausoleum, up the steps and through the door above which had been inscribed the words: 'His mourning widow, Victoria the Queen, directed that all that is mortal of Prince Albert be placed in this sepulchre. A.D. 1862. Vale desideratissime! [Farewell most beloved] Hic demum Conquiescam tecum, tecum in Christo consurgeam [Here at length I shall rest with thee, with thee in Christ I shall rise again].'

Of all the ceremonials [Lord Esher thought], that in the Mausoleum was the simplest and most impressive. The procession from the sovereign's entrance, the Princess of Wales leading Prince Edward [the future Duke of Windsor] the other children walking, was very touching and beautiful. At the Mausoleum, the arrangements were left to me. Everyone got into the Chapel and the iron gates were closed ... the guardsmen brought in the coffin. The King and the Princes and Princesses standing on the right. The choir on the left ... Of all the mourners the Princess of Wales and the young [sixteen-year-old son of the Duke of Albany] Duke of Coburg displayed the most emotion.12

The service [Randall Davidson thought] was touching beyond words. After the Blessing it had been arranged that the Royal Family should all pass in single file across the platform looking upon the grave in which the two coffins then lay side by side. The King came first alone, but, instead of simply walking by, he knelt down by the grave. Then the Queen followed, leading the little Prince Edward by the hand. She knelt down, but the little boy was frightened, and the King took him gently and made him kneel beside him, and the three, in perfect silence, were there together - a sight not soon to be forgotten. Then they passed on, and the Emperor came and knelt likewise, and so in turn all the rest of the Royal Family in a continuous string. Then the Household or at least the few who had been invited to be present. As we left the building the rain or sleet began to fall.¹³

Lord Esher was left with the problem of the white stone figure of the Queen which had been made by Baron Marochetti at the same time as that of Prince Albert, the sculptor's last completed works. The Queen had told him about this figure the year before, but 'no one had heard of it ... After a minute enquiry, an old workman remembered that about 1865 the figure had been walled up in the stores at Windsor. The brickwork was taken down, and the figure found. '¹⁴

It was placed, as she had intended, on the tomb chest next to the effigy of the Prince. He is portrayed as facing upwards to the mosaics in the dome. Her young face inclines towards the husband whom she so deeply loved.

On the evening of the Queen's death, the novelist, Henry James, had come out of the Reform Club into Pall Mall. The streets around it seemed to him 'strange and indescribable'; passers-by spoke in hushed tones as though they were frightened. It was, for him, 'a very curious and unforgettable impression'. He had not expected to be so moved, since it was, after all, 'a simple running down of the old used up watch', the death of an old widow who had thrown 'her good fat weight into the scales of general decency'.¹⁵

Yet while writing letters later on the club's black-bordered stationery he 'continued to experience unexpected emotions'. He recognized that the death of the 'brave old woman' with her 'holding-together virtue' marked the end of an era. She had been a 'sustaining symbol'. He wrote to a friend: 'I mourn the safe and motherly old middle-class Queen, who held the nation warm under the fold of her big, hideous Scotch-plaid shawl and whose duration has been so extraordinarily convenient and beneficent'. It had 'prevented all sorts of accidents'.

As with the people walking the streets outside, James viewed the future with apprehension. He was assured that the new King was already making a good impression but the Victorian world with its faults and its virtues was already passing away; and, as for the future - in his own word, 'Speriamo', one could only hope.