It was fitting, perhaps, that the Queen’s body lay in state for the next ten days in the Osborne dining room, which was hastily refitted as a chapel, with the family portraits covered up, and a Union Jack hanging on one wall. The funeral, on 2 February, was, in accordance with Victoria’s wishes, a white one: the coffin was draped in a white and gold pall, white horses pulled the carriages, and instead of black drapes in the London streets, purple with white trimming was used instead. Even the weather helped, when, at the end of the bitterly cold day, the falling sleet turned to white snow. She was buried in the Frogmore mausoleum, next to Albert, in a coffin filled with trinkets and mementos of the previous 81 years. After some hasty investigation, the marble statue she’d had commissioned to match that of Albert in 1861 was dug out from where it had been temporarily mislaid, and put in place.
The new King, Victoria’s eldest son Albert Edward, rejected firmly his mother’s choice of name, saying he could never be King Albert – there could really only be one Albert and he had died in 1861. He declared he would rule as Edward VII. It was a firm break with his mother’s desires, and a declaration of intent. His accession, in his view, had come twenty years too late, and at 59 he was already showing signs of bad health. Dr Reid commented that ‘he eats far too much, and drinks to match!’1 He was also a chain-smoker, rarely without a cigar in his mouth. Unlike Victoria, however, he largely escaped censure, at least to his face. Bertie could eat like a King and be accepted in ways that his mother never could.
And eat Bertie did. Victoria had despaired of him early on. Her own and Albert’s expectations of their eldest son had always been too high for any mere mortal, and when, as a child, he proved more interested in pranks and playing than study and abstinence, he was immediately put on a regime of study and diet which had reflections of Victoria’s own childhood. It didn’t work, and Bertie grew into a fully fledged glutton, philanderer and good-time party guy. In other words, he was a lot like his mother, had she been freed of gender constraints, in her brief pre-Albert phase. He was thought of as jolly lovely but a bit dim, with nicknames including Tum-Tum and, as he acceded to the throne, Edward the Caresser.2 No one expected a great deal from him in 1901: he was a smart dresser, but obese, a delightful man but with a scandalous past, and his love of fine living defined him. He’d had little experience of what ruling Britain meant, for Victoria, believing him to be foolish and feckless, refused to let him help her. Even he once remarked that he’d rather have been a landscape gardener.3
But Bertie, as Edward VII, surprised everyone. Although most of his life had been spent canoodling, shooting, gambling and eating, he had also deputised for his mother abroad, and all that partying was founded on a genuine love of company, which meant that he was effortlessly charming. As a king, he was a skilled diplomatist at home and abroad. His efforts to calm the increasingly febrile atmosphere in Europe, and to promote the Anglo-French entente cordiale, went hand-in-hand with his work to manage the political scene at home. Victoria had democratised the monarchy, in a certain sense, putting out pictures of family life, publishing homely extracts from her journals, and working hard to make people forget her ghastly Georgian forebears. Her jubilees had been masterclasses in polite pageantry. Bertie went one step further and now made the institution relevant in a new century, building on the ceremonial displays of pomp and patriotism engendered by the jubilees (and Victoria’s funeral), and reworking the monarchy as a repository of tradition, and that indefinable thing, British values. As a result, he is often credited with ensuring the survival of the monarchy into the twentieth century.
At home, Bertie was brutal in the changes he wrought, sweeping away the creaking edifice of the late Victorian court and making his own, Edwardian age, quite distinct from what had come before. He kept the good bits, and destroyed what he saw as the bad. Since the glory days of the 1840s and 1850s, when Victoria and Albert had pumped money into the physical structures of the monarchy, there had been little or no real investment. A report into the Windsor kitchen gardens, left to run themselves since the 1850s, concluded that they were, ‘strangely unworthy in equipment and methods of cultivation … altogether discreditable to those who have been responsible for [them]’. What had been cutting edge 60 years ago was now hopelessly out of date: the plant houses had ‘none … which conform with the position of modern gardening’; the heating was ‘a most extravagant system both in fuel and labour’, and the potting sheds were ‘in keeping with the needs of the moderate horticultural practice of the early years of the last century, but … quite inadequate to modern requirements’.4 The same was true of the palaces as well, which, apart from the installation of electric lighting, and the addition of bike sheds as the new craze for cycling swept the court in the 1890s, had undergone little real modernisation since 1861. Bertie swept into action: Osborne was turned into a convalescent home, and Sandringham replaced it in the convenient country home stakes; Balmoral was kept, as it was politically important, but the whisky allowance was drastically cut, and habitual drunkenness now banned; Buckingham Palace was wholly revamped and became the major royal palace of the era; and at both Buckingham Palace and Windsor the creepy, unchanged rooms where Albert had passed his last days were torn apart, the ornaments and holiday souvenirs flung out, and the dusty old books packed up and removed.
The kitchens weren’t left alone either, although they were less in need of modernisation, such was the slow pace of technological change at an aristocratic level. However, by 1907, Windsor finally had gas ovens, supplied by William Sugg & Co. (and which remain in use, at least in the pastry room). Staffing changes were drastic: Louis Chevriot, who’d been chief cook for a mere four years, was replaced, and left to run a small hotel in London (where he employed his own cook). Great swathes of the kitchen staff were pensioned off, including the first three master cooks (George Malsch was now listed as having completed 45 years in service, so he was, admittedly, a tad superannuated), the chief confectioner and his assistant, and the first pastry assistant.5 The apprenticeship scheme was abolished altogether, with the new chief chef, Juste Alphonse Menager, dismissing it as a waste of money, for they struggled to get the quality, and if they did, the newly trained cooks left and went to work for more money elsewhere. Menager had been part of Bertie’s separate kitchen establishment since 1888, and he was one of a number of staff who crossed over from Marlborough House, which was the Prince of Wales’ official London residence. The reshuffle was substantial, with maids and cooks joining in various positions, to be promoted hastily into others when vacancies occurred, and it took several years for the dust to settle properly. Bertie was used to a different type of food, the very high-end French cuisine classique, which at the time was being elaborated and codified by one of the icons of French cooking, the chef at the Carlton Hotel in London, Auguste Escoffier. There was no more room for garbled German puddings, or sideboards full of good British roast meat, and service à la Russe was now fully adopted, in its most elaborate and show-off form, its seven courses cooked by a team handpicked for their ability to show the world that Edward VII had arrived.
Elsewhere in the Establishment, there were other changes. Whisky-sodden footmen were out, and a smart new regime was in. It permeated everything: even the dining ledgers became more ordered and a great deal more legible after 1901. For a few months, the Indian servants stayed on, and continued to wait on the royal table, but in July 1901 they, too, were awarded pensions and shipped back to Agra. Instead, an Egyptian, Amin Ibrahim, was brought over from Hamburg. He was prized for his excellent coffee-making skills, and ‘the ladies were very fond of the thick, sweetish brew’.6 He appeared kitted out in full eastern-style garb, paid for by the privy purse and which included blue and red silk suits, shot with gold and silver embroidery, white gaiters and shoes, and an ‘eastern fez’.7
Bertie was a gourmet, but he was also a glutton who, like his mother, yo-yo dieted and had a troubled relationship with food.8 After his accession he ate even more, using food as a crutch to cope with all the work he so desperately wanted to do, and do well. He drank heavily, bolted his meals, and used food as an escape mechanism.9 He had more in common with Victoria than she (or he) may have cared to recognise. From the teenage years, when she gobbled and gorged on fruit, through early queenship when she gained and lost weight with terrifying speed, and from the restraint or distraction that came with her marriage, food had been a fundamental way in which she asserted control. In mourning, and afterwards, as she rediscovered her zest for life, it was a comfort, and as she outlived her friends, her servants and, eventually, some of her children, it was left as one of her few pleasures. Food was the only true constant in her life: it didn’t judge, it didn’t moan, it rarely disappointed, and there was always something new to discover just around the corner.
Human lives are marked out by meals: the everyday routine of breakfast, lunch and dinner (and/or tea); the yearly rituals of birthdays, Easter and Christmas; and the life stages of christenings, weddings and funerals. Any life can be defined by food, but with Victoria it seems especially true. She ate like only a queen could, ignoring the people who told her what to do or suggested that women shouldn’t have large appetites, retaining control over that one element even as she lost control of her children, or her ladies, and as the balance of power between monarch and Parliament shifted decisively away from her. Although she presided over a period of massive culinary change, her own meals became monotonous and, like the palaces in which she lived, unchanging in the face of outside influences. They were not anachronistic, but they were old-fashioned. When Bertie swept the old away, the new was still recognisable. A greedy Queen was replaced by a greedy King, but the culinary legacy of Victoria would live on. British cuisine, like Victoria’s menus, is a mishmash of different cultures and styles made coherent by use. Like Victoria the Queen, it can be complicated, and time-consuming and awe-inspiring, and some of the best chefs in the world are British. But it can also be, like Victoria the person, down-to-earth, honest and delightful. She ate bustard and turtle, and mutton chops and giant apples. She drank milk, and tea, and champagne and whisky, and all with equal delight. She embraced, wholeheartedly, all that the world had to offer her to eat, for all of her life, and for that she deserves respect. She had a lot of flaws – after all, she was human – but her greed for food reflected a wider appetite for life, and for experiences so often denied to her. So she was greedy, yes, but just sometimes greedy can also be good.