‘It is one o’clock and all, all is over!’ wrote Queen Victoria on 23 December 1861.1 Wearing deepest black and a locket of Albert’s hair round her neck, the queen sat at her desk at Osborne, her Italianate palace on the Isle of Wight. At Windsor, mourned by his red-eyed household and sobbing sons, Albert’s coffin was lowered into the vault of the British kings in the silent gloom of St George’s Chapel. His death aged forty-two was as unexpected as it was annihilating for the queen. Howling with grief, bursting into paroxysms of uncontrollable weeping and tortured by sleepless nights, she had been forced to leave her husband’s body and hide at Osborne. ‘My life as I considered it is gone, past, closed!’2 ‘To the Queen it is like death in life!’, she wrote.3 To the foreign secretary she wrote of her ‘utter desolation, darkness and loneliness’.4
Victoria ordered the Blue Room at Windsor where Albert had died to be photographed and kept as a shrine exactly as he had left it, ‘even to an open pocket handkerchief on the sofa’.5 The same rituals were performed at Osborne. Some worried about her sanity. But the queen remained clear-headed. She was sure of one thing: she would not abdicate. On the day after the funeral she told her uncle, King Leopold of Belgium, that her work in life would be to make ‘his wishes … his plans … my law!’. ‘I am also determined that no one person, may he be ever so good … is to lead or dictate to me.’6 She would rule alone.
The death of Prince Albert was a hinge, splitting the life of the forty-two-year-old Victoria into two halves. The first part was almost a fairy story, or so it seemed. The unhappy princess, kept virtually a prisoner by her mother, had succeeded as queen four weeks after her eighteenth birthday. Her court was a Camelot, famed for its youth and gaiety. But, fatally ignorant of politics, Victoria was dancing to disaster. From this she was rescued by her marriage to Albert, in one of the great love matches of history. This is the romantic narrative of Victoria’s life, reprised in films such as The Young Victoria (2009). It is the story with which we are most familiar. Victoria’s early life has become a media industry, a spin-off from Jane Austen Inc.
The second half of Victoria’s life is strangely obscure. The Widow of Windsor hid from her people for forty years, and she has managed to elude her biographers too. As Lytton Strachey wrote, ‘For her biographer, there is a darkness over the latter half of [Victoria’s] long career … With Albert’s death a veil descends.’7 Defeated by this darkness – and by the sheer weight of material – her biographers Monica Charlot (1991) and Cecil Woodham-Smith (1972) abandoned ship in 1861. Elizabeth Longford (1964) was the first biographer to steer a course through the voluminous archives of Victoria’s life post-Albert. But only A. N. Wilson (2014), her most recent biographer, has shifted the focus to the second half of Victoria’s life, suggesting that Albert’s death was a sort of liberation, allowing her to realize her true self after a painful struggle with her demons.
My first in-depth encounter with Queen Victoria came when I was writing a biography of her son, Bertie, later King Edward VII. I was astonished by the way she treated her children. Letters and reprimands rained down, penned in Victoria’s emphatic hand, heavily underlined, her nib digging deep into the paper. As a parent, Victoria seemed extraordinarily unsympathetic, especially to twenty-first-century eyes. It struck me that she had displayed all the characteristics of an angry, unloving mother during the time that was supposedly the happiest of her life – her marriage to Albert. Perhaps the marriage was not so perfect after all. Perhaps the glossy Hollywood image of The Young Victoria is largely a myth. And Victoria’s later years, shrouded in mystery, are far more interesting than the ‘we are not amused’ cliché implies. There is, for a start, the question of how the diminutive and invisible queen became in her old age one of the most powerful women in the world, controlling her family, her dynasty and even European diplomacy.
One of the most perceptive writers on Queen Victoria was the historian Roger Fulford. He considered that, more than any other monarch, Victoria was ‘fashioned’ by the monarchy. According to him, this accounted for the contradictions in her character. ‘She was stubborn but she was not inflexible. To her mother, her children and grand-children, to her courtiers and ministers she showed a side of her nature which was steely, but to circumstances and changes in her surroundings she was far less hard – indeed she changed as they changed.’8 As well as the throne, Victoria was fashioned by her relationships with men – not only with Albert, but also with ministers such as Melbourne or Disraeli, and perhaps John Brown as well.
Victoria was indeed a woman of contradictions. I have tried not to sit in judgement on her grumpiness and selfishness. Nor have I celebrated her many different selves in postmodernist fashion, tempting though it might be to construct her as the crimson-faced and furious Queen of Hearts in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, screaming ‘Off with her head!’
During the writing of this book I have been struck by the conflict (as Victoria saw it) between her role as a woman and her vocation as queen. Her relationships with her mother, her husband and her children were all distorted by this tension. Her rank did not insulate her from the pressures of an all-male political world. She considered that a female monarch was an anomaly. ‘I am every day more convinced that we women, if we are to be good women, feminine and amiable and domestic, are not fitted to reign’, she wrote in 1852.9 But reign she must. Her strength of will in clinging to her birthright was extraordinary. Truly was it said that she had a vein of iron.*
From the age of thirteen Victoria wrote her journal every day of her life. She was a prolific, fluent writer, effortlessly pouring out an entry of 2,500 words or so at night before going to bed. The journal began as a semi-public document, to be read by her mother and governess, but as she grew older it became private and confessional. Many of the secrets that Victoria confided to her journal will never be known. From the date of her marriage to Prince Albert, the journals exist only in the version edited by Princess Beatrice, Victoria’s youngest daughter, who made it her life’s work to transcribe and revise her mother’s diaries, destroying the originals as she went. Even the bowdlerized Princess Beatrice version is a remarkable document, however, and in 2012 the entire run – 141 volumes, comprising 43,765 pages and spanning the years 1832 to 1901 – was digitalized and made freely available online on http://www.queenvictoriasjournals.org/home.do Queen Victoria became immediately accessible as she had never been before.
As her journals show, Victoria was unusually self-aware. She possessed a detachment that enabled her to stand outside and reflect on her own character and on the narrative of her life. Margaret Thatcher, another powerful woman in a male-dominated political culture, never looked back, and she worked so hard that she left herself no time for self-examination.10 Victoria, by contrast, enjoyed a remarkable ability to see the trajectory of her own story. When Albert died, she wrote: ‘The poor fatherless baby of eight months is now the utterly broken-hearted and crushed widow of forty-two!’11
Victoria was the inventor of royal biography. After Albert’s death she tried to ease her grief by composing an account of their life together. The Early Years of the Prince Consort appeared under the name of her private secretary, General Grey, but the book is largely compiled from the queen’s own writings. Though generally ignored by scholars, it marks a milestone in the development of royal biography. It reveals with disarming frankness the private life which Prince Albert had created for the royal family.
Later, the queen commissioned Sir Theodore Martin’s five-volume Life of His Royal Highness The Prince Consort (1875–80). Reviewers groaned as one volume after another praising the sainted Albert as a paragon among princes fell stillborn from the press. Victoria’s children, however, considered that the book revealed too much about their family life. She defended her decision to publish thus: ‘in these days people will write and will know, therefore the only way to counteract this, is to let the real full truth be known, and as much as can be with prudence and discretion, and then no harm but good will be done.’12
Victoria’s successors however did not agree. No official biography of Queen Victoria was published after her death in 1901. Rather than commission two fat volumes of life and letters, the royal advisers led by Lord Esher took the unusual step of publishing the queen’s correspondence. Three volumes of The Letters of Queen Victoria, taking her life up to 1861, appeared in 1907. The Edwardian editors, A. C. Benson and Esher, left out material that was judged to be sensitive or damaging. They saw nothing strange in Albert’s drive for power, taking over the role of monarch and rendering Victoria incapable by making her pregnant nine times in seventeen years. The letters Victoria wrote to other women the editors thought ‘very tiresome’, so there is little about matters such as childbirth or clothes.13 One effect of the Benson/Esher editorial policy was thus to redact much of the material which revealed Victoria’s doubts and torment about her conflicting public and private roles.
Lytton Strachey’s Queen Victoria (1921) is a small masterpiece – brilliantly ironic and lit by shafts of malice and wit. I have returned to it again and again, and each time I find more to admire. For Strachey, however, ‘truth telling’ in biography was not about exploring the private life; he was interested in exposing the gap between cant and reality, in pricking the balloons of conceit and hypocrisy. Prince Albert suffered especially from Strachey’s acid pen. Albert’s looks, wrote Strachey, were distressingly un-English. ‘His features were regular, no doubt, but there was something smooth and smug about them; he was tall, but he was clumsily put together, and he walked with a slight slouch. Really, they thought, this youth was more like some kind of foreign tenor than anything else.’ Victoria, by contrast, he described as stout, but with ‘the plumpness of a vigorous matron; and an eager vitality was everywhere visible – in her energetic bearing, her protruding, enquiring glances, and her small, fat, capable and commanding hands’. Even Strachey warmed to the little, forthright queen. Few would disagree with his assessment of Victoria’s fundamental characteristic: ‘It was her sincerity which gave her at once her impressiveness, her charm, and her absurdity. She moved through life with the imposing certitude of one to whom concealment was impossible – either towards her surroundings or herself.’14
Since Elizabeth Longford published her landmark biography, attention has shifted to Victoria’s family life. A great deal of material has been made available, including the important correspondence with her daughter Vicky, the Crown Princess of Germany, which escaped the censorship of the early editors (see Further Reading). Wherever possible, I have used Victoria’s own writings, letting her speak in her own very distinctive voice.
Queen Victoria reigned for sixty-four years. As Strachey once remarked, ‘Queen Victoria is a fine subject but she widens out alarmingly.’15 My aim in this very small book has been to ask big questions. Why was Victoria so strong-willed as a young woman? How did her marriage change her? How did she survive the personal crisis of 1861 and how was she altered? I can only sketch the answers; space does not allow me to widen out alarmingly. But if the book has a purpose, it is to suggest that Queen Victoria’s many contradictions can only be fully understood by exploring the tensions between her public role and her private life.