Queen Victoria Read online

  For Gráinne and Aeneas, with all love

  ‘I could tell you my adventures – beginning from this morning,’ said Alice a little timidly: ‘but it’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.’

  Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865

  ‘Elizabeth [I] was a great Queen but a bad woman; and even in her royal capacity she erred sometimes; she had a very great idea of her prerogative and was more arbitrary even than her tyrannical father.’

  Princess Victoria, c.1834

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  QUEEN VICTORIA’S FAMILY TREE: A SIMPLIFIED VERSION

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER 1: ‘Pocket Hercules’

  CHAPTER 2: ‘Fresh and innocent as the flowers in her own garden’

  CHAPTER 3: ‘Constant amusements, flattery, excitements and mere politics’

  CHAPTER 4: ‘Every quality that could be desired to render me perfectly happy’

  CHAPTER 5: ‘The cares of Royalty pressed comparatively lightly’

  CHAPTER 6: ‘The pain of parting’

  CHAPTER 7: ‘Unavailing regrets’

  CHAPTER 8: ‘A Highland Widow’

  CHAPTER 9: ‘Wisest counsellors’

  CHAPTER 10: ‘Mother of many nations’

  CHAPTER 11: ‘All that magnificence’

  PICTURE SECTION

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  ALSO BY MATTHEW DENNISON

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  1. Victoria, Duchess of Kent with Princess Victoria by Sir William Beechey, 1821 (The Royal Collection © 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II / The Bridgeman Art Library)

  2. Victoria Regina by Henry Tanworth Wells, 1887 (The Royal Collection © 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II / The Bridgeman Art Library)

  3. Queen Victoria by Sir Francis Grant, 1843 (The Crown Estate / The Bridgeman Art Library)

  4. Queen Victoria by Alfred Edward Chalon, 1838 (Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland / The Bridgeman Art Library)

  5. Lord Melbourne with Queen Victoria’s dog, Islay, by Queen Victoria (The Royal Collection © 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II / The Bridgeman Art Library)

  6. Prince Albert by Emil Wolff, 1844 (The Royal Collection © 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II / The Bridgeman Art Library)

  7. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert at the Bal Costumé of 12 May 1842 by Sir Edwin Landseer, 1842–6 (The Royal Collection © 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II / The Bridgeman Art Library)

  8. To the Queen’s Private Apartments, English School, 19th century (The Royal Collection © 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II / The Bridgeman Art Library)

  9. Queen Victoria with her Four Eldest Children by Franz Xaver Winterhalter, 1845 (The Royal Collection © 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II / The Bridgeman Art Library)

  10. Badge of the Order of Victoria and Albert by Tommaso Saulini, c.1863 (The Royal Collection © 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II / The Bridgeman Art Library)

  11. Queen Victoria, Alice and Louise with portrait of Albert, 1863 (© Hulton Royals Collection / Getty Images)

  12. Her Majesty at Osborne in 1866 by Sir Edwin Landseer, 1867 (The Royal Collection © 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II / The Bridgeman Art Library)

  13. Queen Victoria with a spinning wheel, 1875 (© Hulton Royals Collection / Getty Images)

  14.The Family of Queen Victoria in 1887 by Laurits Regner Tuxen, 1887 (The Royal Collection © 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II / The Bridgeman Art Library)

  15. Queen Victoria by Jean Joseph Benjamin-Constant, 1899 (The Royal Collection © 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II / The Bridgeman Art Library)

  Introduction

  ON THE EVE of Queen Victoria’s coronation, in June 1838, Charles Greville committed to his diary a memorable description of the capital. ‘It is as if the population had been on a sudden quintupled; the uproar, the confusion, the crowd, the noise, are indescribable. Horsemen, footmen, carriages squeezed, jammed, intermingled … not a mob here and there but the town all mob … the park one vast encampment … and still the roads are covered, the railroads loaded with arriving multitudes.’1 Remove the horses and Greville’s picture is recognisable to the modern reader familiar with London in the grip of royal fervour. The Times attempted to unravel the attitude of Greville’s ‘mob’: ‘They thought of [Victoria] not as an individual to be loved with headlong zeal or played upon by corrupt adulation … they regarded her as in herself an institution.’2 Victoria’s success over the course of a long reign was to unite, to the benefit of both, the individual and the institution. In a very personal sense, the monarchy became ‘Victorian’: in the minds of many of Victoria’s subjects, the throne acquired what they understood as her own virtues. This symbiosis invested the British Crown with a tangibly human aspect at the same time as exalting Victoria herself as an archetype and exemplar of all that was laudable in a woman and a ruler. It was partly good fortune, partly born of a sympathetic popular mindset shaped by culture and economics. As we shall see, Victoria’s behaviour did not consistently merit approbation, which, throughout her final decades and beyond, came close to idolatry.

  Hers did not begin as a cult of personality: that happened later. From infancy those closest to her schooled her in a course of exemplary behaviour: her mother, her governess, her canny Uncle Leopold. A backlash against the burlesque and buffoonery of her immediate predecessors, their model of rectitude encouraged a suppression of self in the interests of a tarnished Crown. Outwardly, Victoria’s monarchy came to be characterised by probity, continence and earnestness, all ‘Victorianisms’ derided by posterity. Yet this mandate of good behaviour provided an imprimatur of some resilience for a throne that, in political terms, continued to lose ground to an increasingly elected and representative Parliament. If Victoria did not always keep faith with that mandate, she mostly avoided publishing her transgressions. Returning to the fray at the time of her death, The Times was able to assert unblushingly that, if the monarchy stood ‘broad-based upon the people’s will … we owe these results, to a degree which is hardly possible to over-estimate, to the womanly sweetness, the gentle sagacity, the utter disinteredness, and the unassailable rectitude of the Queen’.3

  Readers of the following account of Victoria’s life will discover that her sweetness, sagacity, disinteredness and rectitude were all variable qualities: she was a woman of dizzying contradictions and myriad inconsistencies, but deeply etched in her makeup was a towering wilfulness that intermittently rendered her foolish, selfish, blinkered, exasperating and apparently self-destructive. In virtually the same breath she was capable of immense charm, humility, compassion, candour, perspicacity, generosity, intrepidity and understanding. ‘How sadly deficient I am, and how over-sensitive and irritable, and how uncontrollable my temper is when annoyed and hurt,’ she confessed to her journal on New Year’s Day 1881.4 She was unflinchingly honest throughout her life, especially with herself. Repeatedly that honesty failed to equate with accurate self-knowledge. A surer estimate than that of The Times belongs to her last prime minister, Lord Salisbury, who commended her ‘inflexible conscience’ and ‘unflagging industry’. Neither predisposition shaped her conduct life long.

  She did not read Walter Bagehot’s The English Constitution, published in 1867. Even without that guidance – staple reading for her successors – she insisted to ministers and prime ministers, clergymen, generals, foreign statesmen and rulers, as well as her own family, on her rights to be consulted, to encourage and to warn, and did so wi
th vehemence and some success. A reluctant showman, she is unlikely to have embraced Bagehot’s definition of public life as akin to theatre: ‘the climax of the play is the Queen’.5 By the end of her reign, however, she had convincingly overturned his qualification that ‘nobody supposes that their house is like the court; their life like her life; her orders like their orders’. Not least among Victoria’s achievements was her calculated presentation of herself as an acme of ordinariness. Even as she exulted in the riches and grandeur of empire, she appeared Britain’s first middle-class monarch, her way of life recognisable and, for the most part, comprehensible to the vast mass of her subjects. Moreover she did so on an international stage, so that the woman who was herself so preoccupied with British prestige abroad became in time a chief source of the very prestige she valued so highly.

  Victoria believed in commemoration. She cheated death’s sting by celebrating those taken from her in concrete and enduring form. She in turn inspired similar acts of conspicuous memorialising and rightly remains among Britain’s best-known and most visible monarchs. So extensive are surviving primary sources relating to her life and reign that it is possible, as academics and biographers have discovered, to support divergent and conflicting interpretations. The present, deliberately short account of Victoria’s life is necessarily a selective portrait. It encompasses aspects of her private and public worlds, of her internal as well as her external landscapes. None is exhaustive, though the focus is consistently Victoria herself: my aim has not been to offer a vision of the age, of her marriage, her family, her legacy. Rather, in attempting to capture what I consider telling aspects of this enduringly great Briton, I hope the present account arrives at a pithy but illuminating definition of its own, albeit qualified and circumscribed by the restrictions of its format.

  1

  ‘Pocket Hercules’

  IN THE SPRING of 1819, Britain’s royal family lacked heirs in the third generation. None denied the fecundity of the geriatric King and his recently deceased queen. George III – mad, irascible, tearful and, to a host of unglimpsed imaginary listeners, still talkative despite his deafness – and red-nosed, snuff-sniffing, cricket-loving Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (plain-featured even in likenesses by Gainsborough and Allan Ramsay) had produced fifteen children and a template of royal domesticity which, with dire consequences, discounted cosiness or intimacy between parents and children. Their vigorous momentum had not been maintained. Too many of those children remained unmarried – or sloppily embroiled in the rouged embrace of middle-aged mistresses, childless or giving birth only to bastards and ill repute; the babble and patter of grandchildren scarcely touched the sovereigns’ dotage. So easily did bad parenting come close to extinguishing a dynasty.

  The Prince Regent, future George IV, was the eldest of the fifteen: in his late fifties balloon-faced, extravagant and quick to pique. Married at the wish of his parents and Parliament, he was father to a single daughter. Like the Regent’s mother another Charlotte, she ought in time to have become Queen of England. Instead she died in 1817 giving birth to a stillborn son. Her short life had been one of shoddy rambunctiousness. Her loathsome parents loathed one another. Neither scrupled to shield their daughter from their differences. In the circumstances this apple-cheeked girl of novelettish instincts might have turned out worse – born of the loveless coupling of a prodigal sybarite and a hoydenish German princess slapdash in the cleanliness of her undergarments and afterwards, it was claimed, over-generous with her favours. In retrospect Charlotte appears a quintessentially Regency figure.

  The unnecessary death of the King’s granddaughter and only heiress presumptive, attributed to obstetric malpractice, had provoked nationwide grief and a crisis in the monarchy. ‘In the dust/ the fair-haired daughter of the isles is laid,/ the love of millions,’ Byron lamented. Commemorative cups and saucers, cream jugs, even printed handkerchiefs echoed the strain. With incontinent capitalisation, one broadsheet implored the nation to, ‘Reflect upon the Uncertainty of HUMAN LIFE, So strikingly exemplified in THE DEATH Of your amiable and much lamented PRINCESS’, a didactic imperative which anticipates the lugubrious piety of the remainder of the century. Politician Henry Brougham described public reaction ‘as though every household throughout Great Britain had lost a favourite child’. Belatedly remorseful – and too late for Charlotte, of course – the hapless obstetrician Sir Richard Croft shot himself. The princess’s death did not inspire her woebegone father once more unto the breach: at forty-nine, the vilified Princess of Wales would not produce a second heir.

  That task fell instead to the Regent’s six surviving younger brothers: Frederick, William, Edward, Ernest, Augustus and Adolphus, in Shelley’s estimation the ‘dregs of their dull race’. Mired in debt and bawdy, these flaunting adulterers were lethargic in matters of duty, slatternly and discreditable, tarnished to the extent of accusations of incest and murder – a boon to caricaturists: with their wigs, pockmarks, gluttony and gout not even ornamental. With hindsight they would be regarded as a nadir for Britain’s monarchy, ‘a race of small German breast-bestarred wanderers’, as anti-monarchist MP Charles Bradlaugh later described the Hanoverians.1 For the high-minded if alarmist Prince Albert, they would provide an enduring cautionary tale.

  Of the seven possible progenitors in the aftermath of Charlotte’s death, William, Edward and Adolphus responded to the siren call of a regal vacancy and an anxious Parliament prepared to barter their debts for an heir (Frederick and Ernest were already married). Hastily they allied themselves to a trio of uninspiring Protestant German princesses: all lacked even the misplaced high spirits of the Regent’s estranged wife. In April 1819, it was Adolphus’s wife, Augusta, Duchess of Cambridge, who gave birth to a healthy son. He was christened George. For seven weeks this infant prince of Cambridge was alone eligible in his generation to inherit the throne of England. But Adolphus was the youngest of the married brothers. Senior in precedence were William, Duke of Clarence (later William IV), described after his death as ‘not … a prince of brilliant and commanding talents’;2 Edward, Duke of Kent, of martinet stiffness, black-dyed hair, surprising philanthropy and tender-hearted devotion to his bride; and Ernest, Duke of Cumberland: emaciated, charmless and acerbic, but more sensitive than history has allowed to his status as England’s most hated man.

  And so from the outset Alexandrina Victoria of Kent was a person of consequence. Born as dawn broke over the southeast corner of Kensington Palace on 24 May 1819, in a room whose costly refurbishment her fifty-one-year-old father had completed only two days previously, she immediately displaced her Cambridge cousin in the line of succession. Sources disagree on when she herself first learnt it. An aura of consequence – occasionally cultivated, occasionally insisted upon – was an attribute she would never lose.

  She would become one of England’s most vigorous monarchs. As a baby, her father described her as ‘a model of strength’: ‘more of a pocket Hercules, than a pocket Venus’.3 Perhaps something of the urgency and precariousness of that scramble which preceded her birth remained with her life long. It is discernible in her later conviction of her own eminence, her retreat behind that impenetrable shield, ‘Queen of England’: she may not have forgotten that her queenship was so nearly that of her older cousin, Charlotte, or indeed young George. At different levels, hers is the response of the lottery-winning poor relation and, at the same time, simply one manifestation of a remarkably forceful nature. Over time much of her public life, with its parade of accessible virtues, represented a deliberate revision of the indignity of her pre-history and the tattered record of her immediate forebears. Fanciful to claim that she was born to right the record: her selfishness and sense of entitlement were equal to those of any of her father’s siblings. But guided by those nearest to her, and prompted by the memory of uncles and aunts set on lives of eighteenth-century excess, as well as her own impulsive if inconsistent craving to exploit her position for good, she would redefine the face and function of Bri
tish monarchy. She embraced an outlook some have labelled middle class and did so with wholehearted sincerity, as much a stranger to real middle-class mores as she was to those of the aristocracy she mistrusted or the Highland tenantry she determinedly idealised. Victoria’s reign reasserted – and successfully bequeathed to her successors – what her contemporary Mrs Oliphant described as ‘that tradition of humdrum virtue’ established by her grandfather George III:4 in that respect she became in fact as well as appearance, as Lady Granville described her in her infancy, ‘le roi Georges in petticoats’.5

  ‘Plump as a partridge’, this child whom J. M. Barrie memorialised in Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens as ‘the most celebrated baby of the Gardens’6 emerged into a world of confinement. That too would persist life long. Although as queen, Victoria flexed her muscles constitutionally and unconstitutionally and was not averse to threatening abdication when it suited her, she never with any conviction sought to escape her restrictive destiny. Her status as queen defined her in her own eyes: it was she who bandied the title ‘doyenne of sovereigns’, its unnuanced orotundity indicative of her later complacency. Sovereignty was in two senses her legacy from her father, for the Duke of Kent was not only royal but romantic too. He had accepted without question the gypsy prophecy told to him on Malta that his unborn child would become a great queen. History has frequently agreed.

  For all his dreaming, her father was injudicious. His frequent good intentions – his scheme to educate the sons of the military and his support for Catholic emancipation, for example – could not outweigh that half-crazy disciplinarianism which caused gossiping diarist and Clerk to the Privy Council, Charles Greville, to dismiss him as ‘the greatest rascal that ever went unhung’.7 His duchess too was not clever. Society labelled her a stupid foreigner, ‘the most mediocre person it would be possible to meet’.8 Ditto the woman who in 1824 became Victoria’s governess, a caraway seed-chewing Hanoverian Lutheran of sharp features and sharper self-estimation called Louise Lehzen. Both women were singularly determined, invested in good measure with the instinct for survival, the one spikily conscious of rank, the other given to jaundice, headaches and nervous debilitation; equal in their firmness and jealously exacting. Determination and adamantine self-will became enduring characteristics of their charge, successfully checked by neither. Lehzen at least made Victoria’s wellbeing her lodestar. Her reward was love and, for an interlude, a front row seat in her pupil’s unfolding drama.