32

Matriarch

ON THE EVENING of 20 June 1887 Queen Victoria sat in the garden of Buckingham Palace, writing in her journal: ‘Fifty years to-day since I came to the Throne! God has mercifully sustained me through many great trials and sorrows.’ She regretted that she was ‘alone, though surrounded by many dear children’, but far from feeling that she wanted to die, as she had for years after the death of her beloved husband, a reinvigorated Victoria was praying that she might be spared a while longer, to serve her country and her empire.

The magic of monarchy seemed to be increasing as its political power declined. As Victoria entered her last decade and Britain enjoyed a period of stability, prosperity and self-congratulation, she basked in the glow of revivified royalism. The Queen-Empress was the unifying symbol of the empire and the nation, the focus of patriotic fervour. While in other parts of Europe countries such as Hungary were asserting their nationality and independence against the imperial control of an alien ruler, in Britain nationalism asserted itself through attachment to a hereditary monarchy, in particular to the reassuringly familiar figure of Victoria.

Whenever she appeared in public, she received an overwhelming ovation. In 1886 she attended the opening of the Colonial and Indian Exhibition at the Imperial Institute in South Kensington. ‘The crowds were enormous and most good humoured and enthusiastic,’ she wrote. The following May she opened the People’s Palace in the East End of London. ‘From the moment we emerged from the station the crowds were immense and very enthusiastic with a great deal of cheering; in the City especially, it was quite deafening.’ On this occasion, she also had to admit to hearing ‘a horrid noise quite new to the Queen’s ears’: ‘the booing and hooting, of perhaps only two or three, now and again, all along the route, evidently sent there on purpose, and frequently the same people, probably Socialists and the worst Irish’.

For the Imperial Institute event, the Foreign Secretary, Lord Rosebery, urged that she should come wearing the crown and the robes of state, in order to impress the colonial representatives who would be present. ‘The symbol that unites this vast Empire is a Crown not a bonnet,’ he told Ponsonby. As usual, Victoria had her way. On this occasion and at both her jubilees, despite the pleas of the Princess of Wales to don all her regal splendour, the bonnet triumphed. ‘Then dressed, wearing a dress and bonnet trimmed with white point d’Alençon, diamond ornaments in my bonnet, and pearls round my neck, with all my orders,’ she recorded in her journal on the day of her Golden Jubilee parade. Long used to the sight of the little black-clad figure of their queen, the public found Victoria’s appearance endearing. Rotund as she was, she had so much natural grace and dignity that what she wore simply did not matter.

Since she had so recently been unpopular, Victoria was surprised at the level of public enthusiasm for her Golden Jubilee. What began as a restricted entry service at the abbey and a family reunion of ‘all the Royalties’ at the palace – at the Queen’s own expense – resulted in an orgy of national rejoicing that raised the monarchy to new heights of popularity.

‘It is impossible for me to say how deeply, immensely touched and gratified I have been and am by the wonderful and so universal enthusiasm displayed by my people, and by high and low, rich and poor, on this remarkable occasion, as well as by the respect shown by Foreign Rulers and their peoples,’ Victoria wrote to Rosebery a month later. ‘It is very gratifying and very encouraging for the future, and it shows that fifty years’ hard work, anxiety, and care have been appreciated.’

In her personal life, Victoria was probably happier than at any time since Albert’s death. Marie Mallet, appointed a maid of honour in 1887, loved the Queen dearly, describing her as a lively, warm, humane person, with a good sense of humour. In her photographs, Victoria felt it was her regal duty to look stern, but in reality she had a ready smile and laughed with real gusto. Her health was better too. Dr James Reid, a Scot and a German scholar, became physician-in-ordinary in 1883, when her ‘nerves’ were no longer a problem. Of all her doctors, he was the least encouraging of any neuroses. He would see her every morning at nine-thirty, but until she lay dying he never saw her in bed.

Victoria rewarded her doctors well, but believed that at table they should sit ‘below the salt’. Reid took to giving alternative dinner parties, to which members of the household gravitated, lured by his witty conversation, a welcome contrast to the rather dull monotony of the royal table. Once she heard about Reid’s dinner parties, Victoria readily invited the rival attraction to join her at table. Not only did she value his advice on medical matters, but she relied on him for his excellent judgement on matters outside his profession.

Even Reid, however, was unable to prevail on Victoria to curb her hearty Hanoverian appetite and watch her weight. In despair, Marie Mallet was to note in 1900:

The Queen is certainly less vigorous and her digestion is 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 but she clings to roast beef and ices!… Sir James has at last persuaded her to try Benger’s and she likes it and now to his horror, instead of substituting it for other foods, she adds it to her already copious meals.

The widowed Queen had kept her youngest child, Princess Beatrice, with her after her marriage to Prince Henry of Battenberg and lived happily with Beatrice, ‘Liko’ and their children. Her numerous grandchildren were getting married and having children of their own. While half deploring the fact that her family were breeding like the rabbits in Windsor Park, she thought her grandchildren dear little things and liked to have one or two of them always around her.

After the death from diphtheria of her daughter Princess Alice, Grand Duchess of Hesse, in December 1878, the Queen had assumed special responsibility for Alice’s motherless children. The eldest, Victoria, had married Prince Louis of Battenberg and the Queen presided at her first confinement, when she gave birth to a daughter in the same bed in which her mother had been born. The child was called Alice after her grandmother and would in turn become the mother of Prince Philip of Greece, who would marry another of Victoria’s great-great-grandchildren, Queen Elizabeth II. Victoria was less than happy about the impending marriage of the youngest of her Hesse granddaughters, Alix, to the future Tsar Nicholas II of Russia.

‘My blood runs cold when I think of her so young most likely placed on that very unsafe throne, her dear life and above all her husband’s constantly threatened and unable to see her but rarely. It is a great additional anxiety in my declining years!’ she wrote to Victoria, Princess Louis of Battenberg.

She was right to be concerned. Two of Victoria’s daughters, Alice and Beatrice, had inherited the haemophilia gene from her and Alice passed it on to Alix, whose son the Tsarevich Alexis was to suffer very severely from haemophilia. The Tsarina’s dependence on Gregory Rasputin, the disreputable ‘mad monk’ who seemed to be able to soothe the Tsarevich during his worst bleeding episodes, was a major contributory factor in the fall of the Romanov dynasty. Victoria was right in her forebodings. Tsar Nicholas, her granddaughter Alix, and all five of their children were murdered by their Soviet guards in the cellar of their Ekaterinburg prison in 1918.

In March 1884 the Queen’s haemophiliac son, Leopold, Duke of Albany, died as a result of a fall while he was staying in the South of France for his health. The cleverest of Victoria’s sons, he had ably fulfilled a secretarial role for the Queen, being given access to papers never allowed his eldest brother, the Prince of Wales. Against all the odds, Leopold had married and fathered two children. The haemophilia gene, which could have been the result of a spontaneous mutation in Victoria, cannot be passed on by the male. Although Victoria understood her son’s disease, little care was taken when arranging the marriages of the daughters of Alice and Beatrice, who were carriers of the disease and passed it on to the next generation.

The celebrations for Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887 were overshadowed for her by worry over the declining health of her dear son-in-law Fritz. The following year, he died of throat cancer. He had reigned as Emperor of Germany for only ninety days. For some time Victoria had been concerned at the ascendancy of the militarists in Prussia and their antagonism towards England. Fritz’s death was the final blow to the Prince Consort’s vision of a peaceful, united, liberal Germany, allied in friendship to England. Victoria was saddened for her daughter Vicky, who was treated none too kindly by her son, the new Kaiser Wilhelm II.

Although the rest of the family considered Willy a pain in the neck, Victoria still tended to view her first grandson as the ‘dear little boy’ who had been such a favourite of his grandfather Albert. She did not hesitate to slap down his pretensions, however. No sooner did he become Emperor than he was complaining that he was not being shown sufficient respect – treated as ‘his Imperial Majesty’ in private as well as in public – by his uncle the Prince of Wales. ‘He has been treated just as we should have treated his beloved father and even grandfather,’ Victoria protested. ‘If he has such notions, he [had] better never come here. The Queen will not swallow this affront.’

The two jubilees and the catalogue of royal weddings, births and christenings kept the royal pageant well to the fore and served to fan the flames of royalist fervour. In 1893 her grandson Georgie, the Duke of York, married Princess May of Teck, daughter of Victoria’s cousin Mary of Cambridge and a great-granddaughter of George III, so uniting a scion of the ‘old royal family’ with the new Coburg dynasty.

‘To describe this day fully would be impossible,’ Victoria wrote. ‘It was really (on a smaller scale) like the Jubilee; and the crowds, the loyalty and enthusiasm were immense. Telegrams began pouring in from an early hour. Was rolled to our usual dining-room, to see from the window all that was going on. Troops, Infantry, Cavalry, Volunteers, crowds, bands, all presented a most brilliant animated appearance. Already, whilst I was still in bed, I heard the distant hum of the people.’

True to her tradition, Victoria wore her ‘wedding lace over a light black stuff, and my wedding veil surmounted by a small coronet’. She travelled with the bride’s mother ‘in the new State glass coach’ amid cheering crowds and later stepped out on to the balcony at Buckingham Palace holding the hands of the bride and groom to resounding cheers.

In June 1894 the Duchess of York gave birth to a son, christened Edward but known in the family as David, the future Edward VIII and Duke of Windsor, closely followed in December 1895 by another Albert, born on the thirty-fourth anniversary of the Prince Consort’s death. ‘Georgie’s first feeling was regret that this dear child should be born on such a sad day,’ Victoria confided in her journal. ‘I have a feeling it may be a blessing for the dear little boy, and may be looked upon as a gift from God!’ Albert, or Bertie, was the future King George VI.

Before long Victoria posed for a formal photograph which combined the intimacy of family photography with the iconography of state portraiture. It was a group photograph of the Queen, the Prince of Wales, the Duke of York and the little Prince Edward of York – three future kings. The photograph stresses primogeniture, the continuity of the royal succession in the male line – after the aberration of a woman’s rule – and promotes the monarchy as a source of stability in a time of rapid, disorienting change.

The Queen was also entering a happier period politically. She confessed to Marie Mallet that she had always disliked politics, that the Prince Consort had forced her to take an interest in them and that since he died she had tried to keep up the interest for his sake. Certainly she did not hesitate to enter the fray, even beyond the requirements of a constitutional sovereign; the level of her activity would indicate, if not genuine enthusiasm, at least a very strong sense of duty and a determination to uphold and exploit her prerogatives.

Victoria’s longevity gave her an immense advantage in later years. It suited the politicians that she should be surrounded by an aura of moral certainty. While those projecting a popular royal image deliberately accentuated the non-political nature of the Queen, Victoria herself was never slow to assert her superior experience over that of her ministers. Until her letters were published after her death, most people did not realize her extensive knowledge of and participation in state affairs, especially in the realm of foreign policy. Just as she insisted that as sovereign she was head of the army and must sign all commissions personally and that as Supreme Governor she should have the last word on ecclesiastic appointments, so she exercised much influence in foreign affairs by vetting the personnel of British representatives abroad. Whatever the constitutional proprieties of her interference, with her broad knowledge of world politics, her superb memory and attention to detail, matched with common sense and a decisive temperament, no minister could afford to ignore the Queen’s opinion.

When Lord Rosebery became Foreign Secretary in 1886, she had been at pains to remind him: ‘The Queen is delighted to be able to assist Lord Rosebery in his very difficult task. She has nearly fifty years’ experience, and has always watched particularly and personally over foreign affairs, and therefore knows them well … All the Powers are very suspicious of a Government at the head of which Mr Gladstone’s name appears,’ she added witheringly. ‘But Lord Rosebery has done much to dispel this already.’

Nor did she reserve her ire for Gladstone alone. Guarding the vested interests of rank and privilege, she was strongly opposed to Lord Rosebery’s plan to reform the House of Lords, after he succeeded Gladstone as Prime Minister: ‘The House of Lords might possibly be improved, but it is part and parcel of the much vaunted and admired British Constitution and cannot be abolished. It is the only really independent House, for it is not bound as the House of Commons is, where they are constantly made to say what they would not otherwise do by their constituents, whom they try to please in order to be elected.’

Perhaps because of her genuine devotion to duty, her will to do what was right and her apparent simplicity, Victoria gained the reputation of being a model sovereign, while sometimes straining the constitution almost to breaking point. Fortuitously, her convictions and prejudices so exactly mirrored those of her era, in particular the sentiments of the middle classes, that she was exonerated. ‘I have always felt that when I knew what the Queen thought, I knew pretty certainly what views her subjects would take, and especially the middle classes of her subjects,’ Lord Salisbury declared. The middle-class image of the Queen which was assiduously cultivated bore little relation to the reality of her life. When she travelled abroad, staying on the Riviera, she did so with an immense retinue of servants and ate off solid gold plates; at home the increased opulence of the age meant that her household budget had to stretch to champagne rather than wine and hothouse flowers and fruit. As ever, her ugly fingers were so weighted with jewels that on occasion she could barely lift a knife and fork.

Victoria’s fascination with her Indian empire and her predilection for the exotic led her in 1887 to engage some Indian servants. Two of them, Abdul Karim and Mahomet, were soon singled out for special favour. The Queen ‘cannot say what a comfort she finds hers’, she enthused about the novelty of having Indian servants who, incidentally, kissed her feet. ‘Abdul is most handy in helping when she signs by drying the signatures. He learns with extraordinary assiduity & Mahomet is wonderfully quick and intelligent and understands everything.’

The following year Abdul Karim was relieved of his domestic duties. He declared that he did not belong to the servant class and held aloof from his fellow servants, sulking or throwing a tantrum if anyone questioned his pretensions. Victoria wrote innocently in her journal:

Am making arrangements to appoint Abdul a munshi, as I think it was a mistake to bring him over as a servant to wait at table, a thing he had never done, having been a clerk or munshi in his own country and being of rather a different class to the others. I had made this change, as he was anxious to return to India, not feeling happy under the existing circumstances. On the other hand, I particularly wish to retain his services, as he helps me in studying Hindustani, which interests me very much, and he is very intelligent and useful.

At last Abdul Karim became the Munshi Hafiz Abdul Karim, the Queen’s Indian secretary, and, in deference to his sensitivity on the subject, all photographs of him handing dishes to the Queen were destroyed. He was given a bungalow at Osborne, where he housed his harem of wives or mistresses – no one was ever sure which. The British doctor who attended the munshi’s ‘wife’ claimed that a different tongue was put out every time. When the Queen’s son Arthur, Duke of Connaught, took exception to the munshi standing conspicuously among the gentry at the Braemar Games in 1890, he took his complaint to Sir Henry Ponsonby, not daring to approach the Queen herself. Fortunately, Ponsonby’s sense of the absurd fitted him well for his role. ‘I replied that Abdul stood where he was by the Queen’s order,’ he recalled, ‘and that if it was wrong, as I did not understand Indian Etiquette and HRH did, would it not be better for him to mention it to the Queen. This entirely shut him up.’

Enquiries in Agra revealed that Abdul Karim’s pretensions were quite unfounded. His father was not a surgeon-general, as he claimed, but an apothecary in a prison hospital. Not only was the munshi a phoney, but the Prince of Wales and members of the royal family and then government ministers began to suspect that he was leaking confidential information to undesirable contacts in India. He became a target for press attacks. In 1894 Victoria, perceiving in the criticism of the munshi the racial and social prejudices she so deplored, fired off a memorandum to Ponsonby:

The Queen wrote rather in a hurry when she mentioned to him the stupid ill-natured article or rather letter about the poor good Munshi & she wd wish to observe that to make out that he is so low is really outrageous & in a country like England quite out of place as anyone can [see] this. She has known 2 Archbishops who were the sons respectively of a Butcher & a Grocer, a Chancellor whose father was a poor sort of Scotch Minister, Sir D. Stewart & Ld Mount Stephen both who ran about barefoot as children and whose parents were very humble and the tradesmen M. and J.P. were made baronets!… The Queen is so sorry for the poor Munshi’s sensitive feelings.

Only after the Secretary of State for India threatened to stop sending the Queen confidential papers relating to India did she agree to prevent the munshi having access to them.

By September 1896 Victoria had reigned longer than any other English sovereign. On the fifty-ninth anniversary of her accession that year, she had written: ‘God has guided me in the midst of terrible trials, sorrows, and anxieties, and has wonderfully protected me. I have lived to see my dear country and vast Empire prosper and expand, and be wonderfully loyal!’

For the first time she was photographed by Downey ‘by the new cinematograph process’. Her enthusiasm for photography remained undimmed. ‘It is a very wonderful process,’ she wrote of the new technique, ‘representing people, their movements and actions, as if they were alive.’ In May 1897 she was seventy-eight. Incipient cataracts meant that she could barely see and she walked with a stick, or was wheeled in her chair, but her energy remained impressive. ‘Seventy-eight is a good age,’ she wrote, ‘but I pray yet to be spared a little longer for the sake of my country and my dear ones.’ The following month, June 1897, she reached the apogee of her reign, the sixtieth anniversary of her coming to the throne.

‘A never-to-be-forgotten day,’ she wrote. ‘No one ever, I believe, has met with such an ovation as was given to me, passing through those six miles of streets … The crowds were quite indescribable, and their enthusiasm truly marvellous and deeply touching. The cheering was quite deafening, and every face seemed to be filled with real joy.’ Prevented from travelling with her eldest daughter Vicky, since as an Empress etiquette prevented Vicky from sitting with her back to the horses, the Queen-Empress travelled in an open state landau, drawn by eight cream horses, a solitary figure, with the Princess of Wales dressed in lilac and her daughter Lenchen sitting opposite her. ‘I felt a good deal agitated,’ Victoria confessed touchingly, ‘and had been so all these days, for fear anything might be forgotten or go wrong.’

This was the high noon of empire and imperial splendour: Victoria ruled over one-quarter of the population of the entire world. Her gender was an asset. Her image as a mother and grandmother, exhibiting the feminine qualities of maternal devotion and disinterested family loyalty, meant that she could be raised to mythic status, as the mother of them all, bringing together many different nations and races under her benevolent protection. Between 1877 when Disraeli made her Empress of India and the Diamond Jubilee in 1897, when Joseph Chamberlain brought the colonial premiers and troops to parade in the Diamond Jubilee procession, every great royal occasion was also an imperial occasion. ‘Before leaving I touched an electric button, by which I started a message which was telegraphed throughout the whole Empire,’ Victoria wrote. ‘It was the following: “From my heart I thank my beloved people, May God Bless them!”’

With Elgar’s ‘Imperial March’ the hit music of the year, the Diamond Jubilee was one of the first major ceremonial occasions to be filmed – a key event in the development of the British film industry. An official photographic portrait of the Jubilee Queen was deliberately not registered for copyright. Consequently, it appeared on thousands of commemorative plates, biscuit tins and souvenirs of all kinds, and was distributed throughout the empire.

In the 1860s Bagehot had predicted: ‘The more democratic we get, the more we shall get to like state and show, which have ever pleased the vulgar.’ The jubilees in 1887 and 1897 benefited from concurrent developments in the media. Newspapers became increasingly nationalized; the Daily Mail, launched by Harmsworth in 1896 and with a circulation of 700,000 in four years, was typical of the new London-based and Conservative press. Criticism of the British monarchy might be found in foreign newspapers, but at home the royal family had become virtually sacrosanct. New techniques in photography and printing meant that illustrations were no longer confined to the expensive, middle-class weeklies. The great royal ceremonies were described and illustrated with unprecedented vividness in a sentimental, emotional, admiring way, which reached a broader section of the public than ever before.

By the end of the Queen’s reign, there was almost no one left who could remember her at the beginning. Victoria’s longevity gave a unifying impression to the era and imbued the monarchy and the history of Britain with a monolithic identity and spurious unity which belied and denied the many changes that had actually taken place in both. If Victoria had died a quarter of a century sooner, her reign would not have been regarded a success and the British monarchy might not have survived. As it was, it became possible to depict the jubilees, those supreme moments of apotheosis, as the natural and appropriate reward for long service and consistently good conduct. It was easy to believe that the Queen had intended to be good from the outset, that there had been no ripples on the smooth surface of relations between Victoria and her ministers, Parliament and people, that there had been no dips in the popularity of the monarchy bringing it almost to the brink of collapse: in other words, that Victoria had succeeded in being good, just as she had promised. She left the monarchy vastly stronger and more important than she had found it.

The outbreak of the Boer War in 1899 marred the sunset of the reign. The eighty-year-old Queen was belligerent as ever: ‘We are not interested in the possibilities of defeat,’ she announced, ‘they do not exist.’ She inspected the Gordon Highlanders before their embarkation for South Africa. Just as during the Crimean War she had knitted balaclavas for the men, now she took to crocheting shawls for them. At Christmas she sent out a box of chocolate to every man at the front with a coloured print of herself on it. The chocolate melted long before it reached the men, but many treasured the tin. She fired off a note to Lord Salisbury: ‘I sincerely hope that the increased taxation, necessary to meet the expenses of the war, will not fall upon the working classes; but I fear they will be most affected by the extra six-pence on beer.’

By the end of 1900 the Queen’s health was failing. She had lost her appetite and was unable to sleep. The will was as indomitable as ever, but her physical strength was ebbing inexorably. She missed going to church, ‘which annoyed me very much’. The last entry in her journal, first given her by Mama when she was a girl to record one of the summer progresses that so irritated William IV, was on 12 January 1901.

‘The news from Osborne is as sad as it can be,’ Lord Esher wrote on 20 January, ‘but what a comfort that the end of this long and splendid reign should come so rapidly. No lingering illness. The Queen drove out on Tuesday. To-day she is at the point of death.’

Family and ministers began to congregate at Osborne. Arthur Balfour, who was to succeed Lord Salisbury as Prime Minister in 1902, was astounded at the accumulation of official boxes in only a few days, since it showed the mass of routine work the Queen had to do. The Duke of Argyll told Sir Frederick Ponsonby, one of the Queen’s equerries, that observing Victoria’s last moments was like watching a great three-decker ship sinking. She would sink, then rally, then relapse. Briefly regaining consciousness and recognizing her eldest son, Victoria held out her arms, crying, ‘Bertie.’ She died at half past six on the evening of 22 January 1901, with her grandson the Kaiser supporting her on one side, and Dr Reid on the other, surrounded by her children and grandchildren.

The raucous and disrespectful behaviour of the British and foreign press who congregated outside the gates of Osborne disgusted witnesses. As soon as they were given word of her demise, they stampeded in a frenzied mass towards the post office in East Cowes, shouting, ‘Queen dead!’ The telegraph network made her death one of the first truly global media events.

The new King, Edward VII, and Prince Arthur lifted their mother into her coffin. As soon as the family had retired, Dr Reid set to work following the instructions she had left with one of her dressers. Victoria wore her widow’s cap on her head and her wedding veil over her face. The coffin contained Albert’s dressing gown, locks of her children’s hair and other mementoes, and, in her folded hands, the doctor placed a photograph of John Brown and his mother’s wedding ring, as she had requested. He carefully concealed them behind the Princess of Wales’s flowers; Alexandra was so upset by the Queen’s passing that she refused to assume the title of Queen or allow anyone to kiss her hand until after the funeral. Bertie, who stripped, burned and destroyed every vestige of John Brown’s existence as soon as he possibly could, would never have allowed it, had he known. Victoria must have loved Brown very much.

Mourning at Queen Victoria’s death was widespread and universal. If the values of her age already seemed to the young to be outdated, narrow, philistine, moralistic and prudish, the more prescient must already have regretted the passing of an era, a twinge of nostalgia for its implications of moral certainty, and a faint foreboding about the future. Britain’s ascendancy was already under threat.

As befitted a soldier’s daughter and a sovereign in time of war, she was given a military funeral, the tiny coffin being carried on a gun carriage through the streets of London and, when the traces of the horses snapped, being pulled by sailors at Windsor. Half the crowned heads of Europe followed the coffin of the woman known to them simply as ‘Grandmama’. It was appropriate that a film of the funeral procession of the great Queen-Empress, Victoria Regina et Imperatrix, the Shah-in-Shah Padshah, the Doyenne of Sovereigns, should be shown around the world in cities as far apart as New York, Melbourne, Cape Town and Delhi. She was laid to rest in the mausoleum she had built at Frogmore, entombed under a marble statue modelled at the time of Albert’s demise forty years previously, the adoring wife lying beside her beloved husband, united at last in death.