10

‘Mother of many nations’

FROM DOWNING STREET, Disraeli, now Earl of Beaconsfield, wrote to congratulate Victoria on 13 May 1879 on the birth of her first great-grandchild, Princess Feodora of Saxe-Meiningen. ‘Your Majesty has become the “mother of many nations” … May all, that now occurs, be for your happiness and glory!’¹ Victoria herself described the birth of the eldest child of the eldest daughter of her own eldest daughter more simply as ‘quite an event’.²

That complacent assessment represented a shift in her thinking. A decade earlier, her response to the birth of Bertie and Alix’s second daughter, Princess Victoria of Wales, had been disparaging. To Vicky she had written on 10 July 1868, ‘I fear the seventh granddaughter and fourteenth grandchild becomes a very uninteresting thing – for it seems to me to go on like the rabbits in Windsor Park.’³ Liberated at last from the chrysalis of her gloom, she now increasingly allowed her thoughts to move in channels of which Albert would have approved. On his twenty-first wedding anniversary Albert had described to Stockmar his marriage to Victoria as ‘green and fresh, and [throwing] out vigorous roots, from which I can, with gratitude to God, acknowledge that much good will be engendered to the world’.⁴ His grandiloquence embraced dynastic intent and a degree of idealism: hindsight mocks his hifalutin certainty. Above all, Albert had dreamed of peace. Those dreams outstripped his own lifespan and also that of his widow; within years of her death all would be shattered. But in her final decades she, who had preferred introspection and withdrawal, again looked outwards. Disraeli had encouraged in Victoria a reappraisal of the possibilities of her position. Giddy with his compliments, exhilarated by her imperial vocation and confident, since 1872, of popular acclaim, she conceived a new role for herself, appropriate in grandeur and extent: ‘mother of many nations’, as Disraeli acclaimed her. To that would be added the homelier epithet of ‘Grandmama of Europe’. This femininised domain suggested a family of nations both imperial and European. Like Albert’s plan for Anglo-Prussian unity, it appeared to safeguard peace but required a puppet-master. That task fell to Victoria. It accounted for the voluminous correspondence she continued almost until her death, and those exhaustive portrait commissions through which, as with Ross’s miniature of Albert so many years before, she asserted hegemony over her nearest and dearest: family likenesses by James Sant, Heinrich von Angeli, Carl Rudolph Sohn and Rudolph Swoboda, which proliferated during the final quarter of the century.

‘What Queen in the world has been so rich in offspring and has such good cause to rejoice in her many children?’ asked one observer in 1887.⁵ In the first years of her marriage, Victoria had protested at the prospect of becoming ‘mamma d’une nombreuse famille’: those protests were short-lived. Quickly, unconsciously, she had learnt to exult in her vigorous brood. When her second daughter, Alice, died of diphtheria on the anniversary of Albert’s death in 1878, aged only thirty-five, Victoria exclaimed painfully, ‘I was so proud of my 9!’⁶ Five years later, haemophiliac Leopold also died. He was thirty and had been married for two years. Yet the principal characteristic of Victoria and Albert’s children was their robustness: all survived to adulthood and all but Louise presented Victoria with a clutch of grandchildren. By the end of her life, Victoria could boast more than seventy grandchildren and great-grandchildren. In time they would occupy the thrones of Britain, Germany, Spain, Russia, Norway, Greece, Romania, Yugoslavia, Sweden and Denmark. Through Coburg blood Victoria would be connected to the royal houses of Portugal, Belgium, Bulgaria, France, Austria and Italy, a commonwealth of royal kinship. Bishop Randall Davidson’s statement in 1896, that Victoria wielded ‘a personal and domestic influence over the thrones of Europe without precedent in the History of Christendom’ could scarcely have surprised his canny sovereign: within that superb afflatus lay a simple truth.⁷ Visiting Windsor Castle in 1899, the German Emperor William II, Victoria’s eldest grandchild, stated with characteristic fanfaronade, ‘From this Tower the World is ruled.’⁸ He ought to have known. That very spring, Victoria warned Nicholas II of Russia, her grandson by marriage, of William’s duplicity. She implored the Tsar for openness and confidentiality: ‘It is so important that we should understand each other, and that such mischievous and unstraightforward proceedings should be put a stop to.’⁹ Little wonder that another grandchild remembered ‘Grandmama Queen’ as ‘the central power directing things’. The vision they shared was that of Kipling’s ‘The Widow at Windsor’: ‘For the Kings must come down and the Emperors frown/ When the Widow at Windsor says “Stop”!’

In May 1887, Victoria wrote to her third son, Arthur, describing a sketch recently completed by the Danish artist Laurits Regner Tuxen. It was a preliminary drawing for the large painting she had commissioned from Tuxen to commemorate the family gathering which would assemble that summer to celebrate her Golden Jubilee. Victoria’s intention was for an image that combined decorative appeal with accurate likenesses. ‘It is not to be stiff and according to Etiquette, but prettily grouped,’ she explained.¹⁰ The painting would also capture Victoria’s twin roles of monarch and matriarch, a further instance of feminine stereotype invoked to qualify her ‘masculine’ sovereign power as a reigning queen.

The difficulties of Victoria’s matriarchy swiftly emerged in Tuxen’s efforts to attain his pretty grouping. The Danish-born Princess of Wales refused to stand next to the Crown Prince of Prussia; two decades after Prussia’s part in the Schleswig-Holstein crisis, which had diminished her father’s throne, Alix remained balefully anti-German. Arthur himself announced that he would rather be omitted from the painting than placed near his youngest sister Beatrice and her husband, Henry of Battenberg, whom she had been allowed to marry in 1885 after protracted struggles with her mother. Louise’s husband, Lord Lorne, at first placed prominently on account of the picturesqueness of his Highland dress, was relegated to a less conspicuous position; instead visible Highland garb belongs to Affie’s son, the higher-ranking Prince Alfred of Edinburgh. Despite Victoria’s dismissal of ‘Etiquette’, the two most prominent men are Bertie and Fritz, respectively the Prince of Wales and German Crown Prince. As powerful as the family loyalties of Victoria’s sons- and daughters-in-law were sibling rivalries among her own children. Happily such vituperation is absent from Tuxen’s finished image, which Victoria described as ‘beautiful, the Drawing room admirably painted and the likenesses very good … the grouping and colouring, all, charming’.¹¹ Yet no one was more conscious than she of the tensions that permeated her far-flung family. To her poet laureate Tennyson, she described her children as ‘though all loving, [having] all their own interests and homes’. More than once she insisted that ‘a large family is a great anxiety’; to Vicky she accounted it ‘an immense difficulty & I must add – burthen to me!’¹² Today Tuxen’s viewer is impressed above all by the size of Victoria’s family, marshalled in superb plenitude in the Green Drawing Room at Windsor Castle. It was surely part of Victoria’s intention. On three further occasions she commissioned similar group scenes from the artist. All assert unequivocally the grandeur and extent of Victoria’s assembled dynasty.

Victoria’s increasingly energetic interest in her family was symptomatic of that reinvigoration within her that took place during the second half of the 1870s. In part it arose from the passage of time, dispelling Albert’s shade. Disraeli also played a part. His policy of awakening his Faery Queen worked too well. As contemporaries noted, having rubbed Aladdin’s lamp so hard, he found it impossible again to banish the genie.

Crises in the Balkans, in which Disraeli supported the ailing Ottoman Empire as a bulwark against Russian expansion into southeast Europe, stimulated Victoria to a renewal of that overheated belligerence she had espoused during the Crimean War. In language, thought and action she disdained moderation. She was bellicose, adamant, emotive. As poet Alfred Austin described her after her death, ‘She bore the trident, wore the helm.’¹³ In 1877, she identified as her ‘one object’ ‘the honour and dignity of this country’.¹⁴ Briefly she reprised her role of John Bull in petticoats: the maintenance of ‘honour and dignity’ demanded a vigorous show of pugnacity and strength. ‘You say you hope we shall keep out of the [Russo-Turkish] war and God knows I hope and pray and think we shall – as to fighting,’ she wrote to Vicky in June. ‘But I am sure you would not wish Great Britain to eat humble pie to these horrible, deceitful, cruel Russians? I will not be the sovereign to submit to that!’¹⁵ Mostly she directed her vigour towards inspiring Disraeli and his Cabinet. ‘Be bold!’ she exhorted. For emphasis she threatened abdication five times in ten months. Daily she bombarded the Prime Minister with letters and telegrams. To the intense irritation of Bertie, whom she continued to exclude from official business, she resorted to employing in her machinations her youngest son Leopold, a Conservative partisan who would later represent her at Disraeli’s funeral. His role as an extra private secretary enabled Victoria to bypass Henry Ponsonby with his Liberal sympathies and admonishments to a course of greater caution.

For opinion in the country at large was divided. Gladstone had re-emerged from retirement to lambast Turkish atrocities against Bulgarian Christians: the ultimate victim of his campaign, which included a bestselling pamphlet The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East, was Disraeli. Victoria’s line was nationalistic and patriotic: it was also overtly party political. Priding herself on her ability to judge the national mood and certain, as she would always be, that her own wishes coincided with the country’s best interests, Victoria, like Disraeli, miscalculated. The latter’s resounding defeat at the polls in 1880 was a catastrophe for his adoring and dependent sovereign. ‘What your loss to me as a Minister would be, it is impossible to estimate,’ she told him frankly.¹⁶ Either desperation or determination inspired her attempts to make Lord Hartington or Lord Granville prime minister; it was soon obvious that Gladstone must be invited to return. As in Melbourne’s replacement by Peel, Victoria felt she could hardly bear it, ‘a most disagreeable person – half crazy, and so excited’.¹⁷ With unwitting irony she labelled him ‘arrogant, tyrannical and obstinate’. His real crime was a perceived lack of regard for her own feelings (presumably in snatching victory against her will); later she would fulminate against ‘the utter disregard of all my opinions which after 45 years of experience ought to be considered’.¹⁸ In the short term, she concealed her chagrin behind more worthy concerns: ‘The Queen cannot deny she … thinks it a great calamity for the country and the peace of Europe!’¹⁹ To Ponsonby she suggested abdicating rather than working alongside her bête noire.

Happy for Victoria that she could not see into the future: the septuagenarian Gladstone still had three terms of office ahead of him. From 1880 to 1885, in 1886 and from 1892 to 1894, sovereign and premier consistently found causes of disagreement. Victoria’s preoccupations remained foreign policy and, to a lesser extent, Ireland: both provided ample grounds for exasperation. Victoria cavilled at what she considered Liberal reluctance to maintain British prestige overseas (described by Victoria as a ‘high tone’). Over Afghanistan, Egypt and the Sudan she berated the elected member. In January 1885, she held him personally responsible for the death of General Gordon, the maverick British commander charged with the defence of the Sudanese capital Khartoum, and took the unprecedented step of telegraphing her disapprobation to Gladstone and members of his Cabinet in a form guaranteed to leak the contents to the public. To Tennyson she wrote with her habitual bustle of ‘the death of that noble Hero Gordon (whose abandonment is an eternal blot on our crown …)’.²⁰ As Laurence Housman’s Victoria tells Bertie in The Superlative Relative: ‘In politics, and still more in foreign policy, the less you rely on people’s honour the better.’²¹ In private, she was polite, occasionally even friendly towards her premier. She had invited him to Arthur’s wedding to Princess Louise Margaret of Prussia in March 1879; invitations followed to Windsor Castle to dine and sleep. Gladstone rightly attributed her behaviour to her ‘beautiful manners’²² and did not confuse good behaviour with kindliness or warmth of feeling. To his wife he maintained, ‘She will never be happy till She has hounded me out of office’ – an accurate estimation.²³ With that goal beyond Victoria’s reach, Gladstone discovered that he had increasing occasion to find his thwarted royal mistress ‘somewhat unmannerly’.²⁴ On 30 January 1886, Victoria invited Gladstone to form his third ministry only after enquiries into her preferred option, a Whig–Tory coalition under G. J. Goschen and Lord Salisbury, proved fruitless. Six years later, as he prepared to take up office for the fourth and last time, Victoria toyed with pre-empting the Grand Old Man by sending for Lord Rosebery, who she insisted be appointed Foreign Secretary.

In the event, Gladstone would plague her only briefly in 1886. His government collapsed in June over proposals for Irish Home Rule. Bluntly Victoria had made clear to him the impossibility of her giving ‘her Prime Minister her full support … when the union of the Empire is in danger of disintegration and serious disturbance’.²⁵ On that occasion, Gladstone was replaced by Lord Salisbury, ‘in whom she could confide, and whose opinion was always given in so kind and wise a manner’.²⁶ Salisbury’s administrations during Victoria’s final years – from 1886 to 1892 and from 1895 to 1901 – were characterised by a degree of harmony between monarch and premier every bit as sincere as her dislike for the ‘deluded old fanatic’ he replaced. Seeing them together, Lady Milner commented, ‘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 forgotten.’²⁷

1886 was otherwise distinguished for Victoria by the public announcement of celebrations for her forthcoming Jubilee, scheduled to culminate in London on 21 June 1887, with a spectacular procession. From inception plans aroused controversy. Victoria’s refusal to travel to Westminster Abbey in state or, as her son Arthur encouraged her, to make herself ‘smart’ in her velvet robes and crown, alongside government fears that overspending on the Jubilee would generate hostility, inspired plans dismissed by the Standard as ‘utterly inadequate, mean, pinched and narrow’.²⁸ It was an unpromising beginning.

Victoria’s first thoughts in connection with her Golden Jubilee were of loss. In her journal on 20 June 1886, she recorded: ‘Have entered the fiftieth year of my reign and my Jubilee year. I was upset at the thought of those no longer with me, who would have been so pleased and happy, in particular my beloved husband, to whom I owe everything, who are gone to a happier world.’

Death had made its impress on the ageing Queen. Canon Baynes’s ‘Hymn for the Jubilee’ asserted, ‘It is not all of brightness/ That gathers round the Throne;/ The chalice of deep sorrow/ Full oft our Queen has known.’²⁹ From among her family and close circle not only Albert, but her mother, Melbourne, Uncle Leopold, Stockmar, her half-siblings Charles and Feodore, the Duke of Wellington (‘so devoted, loyal, and faithful a subject, so staunch a supporter’),³⁰ Lehzen, Napoleon III, his only son Louis Napoleon, Alice, Disraeli, John Brown and Leopold were all gone, a tidy rollcall of mourning obsequies. An inventory of recent deaths had dominated her journal entry for 31 December 1878, from the Kings of Saxony and Hanover to a child and a grandchild.³¹ If Victoria had learnt lately to leaven her sadness with optimism, that sadness persisted. With grim punctilio she observed the anniversaries of those many deaths. Tokens of the departed – on canvas, in marble, bronze and silver gilt, in cairn and granite – clustered close about her like the trappings of an ancient pharaoh preparing to meet his gods in conclave. Her behaviour had changed during the last ten years: she remained recognisably the same. Only in her journal and in her letters is the gulf between the reality of a woman unable or unwilling ever fully to escape the shadows and the bland serenity of the mythologised Jubilee Queens of 1887 and 1897 so starkly revealed. Posterity has inherited a biscuit-tin vision of an elderly monarch who reigned, as Kipling has it, over ‘’alf o’ Creation’, with soft focus benignity: a gentle Britannia whose battles lay predominantly behind her. The truth was more complex. For while the Jubilee Queen of trinkets and penny eulogies basked in a glorious present, many of the real Victoria’s thoughts – as Albert had identified so long ago – continued to be drawn ineluctably backwards.

With that backward glance came conflicting emotions. John Brown’s death in the spring of 1883 inspired a second sortie into authorship. More Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands, published in 1884, was dedicated to Victoria’s ‘devoted personal attendant and faithful friend’. Like Leaves, it was an elaborate homage to her yesterdays. Victoria’s wreath on her servant’s coffin had been inscribed, ‘A tribute of loving, grateful and everlasting friendship from his truest, best and most faithful friend, Victoria R&I’.³² The need for faithfulness in her relationships, and her insistence that they last for ever, represented a familiar impulse and one that would continue to cause her mingled joy and pain.

But the focus of the Golden Jubilee was the public rather than the private Victoria. For the first time commemorative stamps were issued. In booths lining the Strand, street vendors sold a patent automatic bustle which played ‘God Save the Queen’ when the wearer sat down. Carrying flambeaux and Japanese lanterns, Etonians processed through the Quadrangle of Windsor Castle, singing as they marched, ‘Sing together, one and all/ Shout together, great and small/ Victoria! Victoria! Victoria! Our Queen!’³³ In London the sky glittered with a firework portrait of Victoria created by manufacturers James Pain & Sons, 180 feet high and 200 feet wide; technical glitches caused the right eye to flicker uncontrollably. Inscribed on the presentation box of the Golden Jubilee necklace of pearls and diamond trefoils purchased with donations from three million ‘daughters of the Empire’ and formally presented to Victoria, on 30 July 1888, by the Duchess of Buccleuch, was, ‘To Victoria Queen & Empress A Token of Love & Loyalty from the Daughters of Her Empire in remembrance of Her Jubilee’.³⁴ Across the Empire, selected prison sentences were remitted in honour of the anniversary and Victoria’s clemency: each was signed personally. Among cascades of telegrams came the acclamation, ‘Empress of Hindoostan, Head of all Kings and Rulers, and King of all Kings, who is one in a Hundred, is Her Majesty Queen Victoria’.³⁵ All were tributes to a fifty-year reign. Perhaps only the necklace, which she herself had approved at the suggestion of the Women’s Jubilee Offering Committee, touched Victoria personally: she was determined to avoid the short change of a brooch.

She did not admire ceremonial. She had no appetite for the spectacular pageantry which, for an enthusiastic public, distinguished the last years of her reign. ‘I don’t want or like flattery,’ she confided to her journal.³⁶ Mostly she meant it. As in 1872, when she had resisted Gladstone’s plans for a public celebration of Bertie’s recovery, she jibbed at the Jubilee proposals. As in 1872, her obstructiveness was overmastered. Lord Halifax protested that the public needed ‘gilding for their money’, Lord Rosebery that a bonnet rather than a diadem was inadequate apparel for the service of thanksgiving. Both men failed to recognise that the very homeliness of Victoria’s dress, eschewing the swagger of her Continental cousins, could be deeply reassuring to those crowds of well-wishers who endorsed her domesticity but opposed the political engagement of more flaunting kings and princes. (Afterwards, Rosebery made good his lapse by presenting Victoria with a miniature of Elizabeth I and a ‘flattering’ letter. She admired the miniature while admitting, ‘I fear I have no sympathy with my great predecessor.’³⁷) The peers’ criticisms made her nervous; they also served to remind her of who was Queen of England. In March, in high dudgeon, she wrote to Henry Ponsonby: ‘The Queen hopes he will speak strongly to the Ministers, saying she will not be teased & bullied [about] the Jubilee & wh[ich] seems to be considered for the people & their convenience & amusement while the Queen is to do the public and newspapers bidding. She will do nothing if this goes on.’³⁸ It was the Jubilee equivalent of earlier abdication threats and similarly empty. It suggested too the grieving Victoria of the 1860s, for whom duty was a matter of inclination.

On 21 June, after a day of entertaining ‘all the Royalties’ at Buckingham Palace – sovereigns and their suites from Savoy to Siam – she drove in an open landau with an escort of Indian cavalry to Westminster Abbey. Surrounded by a mob of royal relations, enormous crowds and what she described as ‘such an extraordinary outburst of enthusiasm as I had hardly ever seen in London before’,³⁹ Victoria nevertheless found time for bereftness: ‘I sat alone (oh! without my beloved husband, for whom this would have been such a proud day) …’ The previous morning, in a journal entry which recalls that of the first day of her reign, she told herself, ‘The day has come, and I am alone, though surrounded by many dear children.’⁴⁰ That reiterated ‘alone’ was more than empty rhetoric, a linguistic tic acquired through long habit, transformed by the events of 1861 from exultation to despair. It expressed enduring truths about Victoria’s view of queenship and something of her detachment from the glittering but unwelcome roundelay of which she found herself the centre. Four years would pass before she took delivery of the painting she had commissioned from John Charlton of The Golden Jubilee, 21 June 1887: The Royal Procession Passing Trafalgar Square, with its careful delineation of happy, pilchard-tin crowds and ceremonial uniforms. On receipt it hung briefly at Windsor Castle. Afterwards it was removed to Buckingham Palace, the home Victoria avoided. Its fate was markedly different from that of Tuxen’s painting, in which a domestic Victoria, plumply affectionate, is surrounded by her family: ‘mother of many nations’, ‘Grandmama of Europe’. It was exactly as the public wished it. In its post-Jubilee commentary, The Spectator noted that the popular attitude to Victoria demonstrated ‘a change indescribable, but unmistakable; an increase of kindliness and affection, but a decrease of awe. It was a friend of all who was welcomed, rather than a great Sovereign.’⁴¹

The death of a dog was the subject of a letter from Victoria to her granddaughter, the former Princess Victoria of Hesse, in the autumn of 1887. In the aftermath of the Jubilee came this unlooked-for blow. ‘It is indeed a grievous loss to me of a real friend whom I miss terribly,’ Victoria wrote.⁴² Noble was a favourite among her many dogs, described in the photograph album devoted to the royal kennels as ‘a collie of the Cheviot breed’.⁴³ He had been given to Victoria at Balmoral on 24 May 1872, as spring turned to summer following the seismic shift attendant on Bertie’s recovery. Fifteen years later, his death on 18 September inspired gloomy reflections on the part of a still-lonely woman who, half a century ago, at a moment of similar rejoicing, had returned from her coronation in Westminster Abbey, cast aside her robes and hurried upstairs to bathe her beloved spaniel Dash.