Queen's House (23 page)

Stockmar's undoubted success as an invaluable counsellor throughout the first twenty years of Queen Victoria's reign was due to his guiding principles. These should be engraved in letters of gold over every courtier's desk:

If you are consulted by Princes to whom you are attached give your opinion truthfully, boldly, without reserve or reticence. Should your opinion not be palatable, do not, to please or conciliate them deviate for a moment from what you think the truth … never try to make them own how right you were, and how wrong they have been. It must be enough for you that you should, for their good and the good of the country, act upon the principles, the soundness of which is thus acknowledged.
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It was Stockmar's firm hand that steered the Queen and Prince Albert through the stormy waters in their first years, past the two great rocks on which their marriage could have foundered – the presence of the increasingly difficult Lehzen, and the management of the royal House-hold. Stockmar had his own rooms, was allowed special dispensation, could dress as simply as he liked and was allowed to retire before the Queen. He padded quietly round the Palace, observing the incompetence and confusion.

He was also needed to deal with Lehzen, who, now supplanted and jealous, had become a great stumbling block to the happiness of their marriage. Prince Albert knew she must somehow be removed. Although Prince Albert and Queen Victoria were deeply and genuinely in love, they had some spectacular rows – not surprising where two strong-willed
people were concerned. The birth of their first two children clipped Queen Victoria's wings; she chafed at the loss of freedom and hated the trauma of childbirth – which she said made her feel like an animal. She was overstressed and subject to severe headaches, and often exploded with irrational outbursts of anger, which she desperately tried to control.

In the following years she was so often pregnant. From November 1840, when their first child, Princess Victoria Adelaide Mary Louisa – ‘Vicky' – was born, to the birth of Princess Beatrice in 1857, the Queen had nine children. It was not until the birth of Prince Leopold on 7 April 1853 that the Queen's frequent trials were eased by the use of chloroform. John Snow, the famous anaesthetist, reported to Dr Simpson that the Queen was ‘greatly pleased with the effect'. It is not surprising that there were times when Queen Victoria was tetchy. It was difficult enough being a Queen, but to be the mother of nine children as well was sometimes an impossible strain. She can be excused her frequent tantrums.

As for Prince Albert, he became increasingly resentful that he was not the master in his own house. The jealous, possessive Lehzen drove him to unaccustomed bitter fury. He soon realized that the Palace would never be home until he had got rid of her. The governess who had so impressed Lord Holland in 1837 had now become a ‘yellow dragon', spitting fire and venom; the Queen was her child and the household was her territory. She was always there, coming between husband and wife. More dangerous still, as a passionate Whig she encouraged the Queen's prejudices. There was even a rumour that she was funnelling income from the estate of the Duchy of Cornwall into Whig party funds.

The Tories saw her as an enemy: if the Whig government fell, her position would be threatened. So she was not only insecure, she was also overstretched. She controlled the Queen's Privy Purse, acted as her Private Secretary, was in charge of the Queen's domestic affairs and, above all, was responsible for the care of the children. This last was the final straw for the Prince.

In January 1842 Stockmar was concerned to receive hysterical letters from both Queen Victoria and the Prince. There had been an appalling
row in the nursery at the Palace: their child, Vicky, was ill, and Prince Albert blamed the doctor and, indirectly, Lehzen. Clearly he completely lost control, accusing Dr Clark of poisoning ‘the child with calomel' and Queen Victoria of starving her. ‘Take the child away and do as you like, and if she dies you will have it on your conscience,' he wrote to her in a furious letter. Queen Victoria wrote to Stockmar, appealing for his help. Prince Albert had become paranoid about Lehzen: she was, he wrote to Stockmar, ‘a crazy common stupid intriguer, obsessed with lust of power, who regards herself as a demi-god and any one who refuses to recognise her as such, as a criminal'.
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Queen Victoria, he wrote, must choose between him and Lehzen. It was time for Stockmar to intervene. With his usual quiet frankness and wisdom, he wrote to the Queen, who realized at last that Lehzen must go. Prince Albert followed Stockmar's advice and tactfully and gradually eased Lehzen out. On 30 September 1842 Lehzen quietly left, early in the morning, not wishing to upset Queen Victoria with a farewell scene.

The other problem which was infuriating the orderly Prince Albert was the mismanagement of Buckingham Palace. The Prince was appalled to find the Palace accounts in such disorder. Queen Victoria, unaccustomed to dealing with money, had entertained vast numbers of people without thought of expense, and even Melbourne was amazed to hear that in addition she had spent £34,000 on pensions and charities in 1839 alone.

In addition, Queen Victoria was nobly paying off her mother's debts. It is not surprising that she had secretly turned for help to Miss Coutts, the heiress, whose grandfather, the banker Thomas Coutts, in his time had bailed out many royal debtors including George III, the Prince Regent, the royal Dukes and her own father.

As for the organization of the royal Household, as Stockmar's son noted in his memoirs,

On the Queen's Accession to the throne, the existing arrangements were in the highest degree impractical and confused, and resulted in disorder and discomfort. Many obsolete customs were kept simply because it lies in the
English character … to feel the greatest dread of anything like a systematic and comprehensive reconstruction of things.
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To reform the management of the Palace was a task which would take more time than the Prince could spare now that he was taking on more and more of the Queen's work. ‘Whenever you need me,' Stockmar had written, ‘send for me.' Prince Albert needed him now. He came, and with his help Prince Albert undertook a complete reorganization. Stockmar spent some months at the Palace and on his return to Coburg produced a detailed memorandum.

Stockmar's son claimed in 1872 that at the time he was writing, ‘The English court … is one of the best ordered courts in Europe; the organization is practical, the service is done with exemplary regularity and punctuality.'
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He considered that this transformation from a Court still tainted by Regency corruption and inefficiency was mainly due to the work of Prince Albert, under the guidance of Baron Stockmar.

Stockmar described his report as:

Observations on the present state of the Royal Household; written with a view to amend the present scheme, and to unite the security and comfort of the sovereign with the greater regularity and better discipline of the Royal Household.
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His first comment was that Court appointments were

great officers of state, who are always noblemen of high rank and political consideration and change with every Government. Since the year 1830 we find five changes in the office of the Lord Chamberlain, and six in that of the Lord Steward.

Then there is another great inconvenience. It is, that none of the great officers can reside in the palace, and that most frequently they cannot even reside in the same place with the Court. Hence, an uninterrupted and effective personal inspection and superintendence of the daily details of their respective departments are made impracticable. Hence follows another bad consequence. Most frequently the great officers of State find themselves so situated, as to be forced to delegate,
pro tempore,
part of their authority to others. From want of proper regulations, they must delegate it, as it were,
ex-tempore,
and to servants very inferior in rank in the Royal Household; a fact which, almost daily, is
productive of consequences injurious to the dignity, order, discipline, and security of the Court.
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So Edmund Burke had complained in the reign of George III.

Then there was no co-operation between departments responsible for the running of the Palace. At that time the government departments responsible were the Treasury, which provided most of the income, and the Department of Woods and Forests, which took care of the outside. The Lord Chamberlain, the Lord Steward and the Master of the Horse shared responsibility for the interior, but at the beginning of Queen Victoria's reign, no one was quite sure where the demarcation lines were.

As Stockmar's memorandum revealed,

In the time of George III, the Lord Steward had the custody and charge of the whole palace, excepting the Royal apartments, drawing rooms, &c., &c. In George IV.'s and William IV.'s reign, it was held that the whole of the ground-floor, including halls, dining-rooms, &c., were in his charge. In the present reign, the Lord Steward has surrendered to the Lord Chamberlain the grand hall and other rooms on the ground-floor; but whether the kitchen, sculleries, pantries, remain under his charge … is a question which no one could perhaps at this moment reply to. The outside of the palace is, however, considered to belong to the Woods and Forests; so that as the inside cleaning of the windows belongs to the Lord Chamberlain's department, the degree of light to be admitted into the palace depends proportionably on the well-timed and good understanding between the Lord Chamberlain's Office and that of the Woods and Forests.
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There was no general directing officer and the departments were in a ridiculous muddle. Stockmar gave examples.

The housekeepers, pages, housemaids, &c., are under the authority of the Lord Chamberlain; all the footmen, livery-porters, and under-butlers, by the strangest anomaly, under that of the Master of the Horse, at whose office they are clothed and paid, and the rest of the servants, such as the clerk of the kitchen, the cooks, the porters, &c., are under the jurisdiction of the Lord Steward. Yet these ludicrous divisions not only extend to persons, but they extend likewise to things and actions. The Lord Steward, for example, finds the fuel and lays the fire, and the Lord Chamberlain lights it. It was upon this state of things
that the writer of this paper, having been sent one day by Her present Majesty to Sir Frederick Watson, then the Master of the Household, to complain that the dining-room was always cold, was gravely answered, ‘You see, properly speaking, it is not our fault; for the Lord Steward lays the fire only, and the Lord Chamberlain lights it.' In the same manner the Lord Chamberlain provides all the lamps, and the Lord Steward must clean, trim, and light them. If a pane of glass, or the door of a cupboard in the scullery, requires mending, it cannot now be done without the following process: A requisition is prepared and signed by the chief cook, it is then counter-signed by the clerk of the kitchen, then it is taken to be signed by the Master of the Household, thence it is taken to the Lord Chamberlain's Office, where it is authorised, and then laid before the Clerk of the Works, under the office of Woods and Forests; and consequently many a window and cupboard have remained broken for months.
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The Palace also urgently needed improved sanitation. The Queen herself had a flushing lavatory, but even she suffered from the overflow of the room above her dressing room. Stockmar's delicacy prevents us from hearing the full horror of the lack of sanitation in the royal Palaces. We are grateful to John Pudney for enlightening us.

It took more than royal attacks of wherry-go-nimbles and the employment of ‘Artists' [plumbers] … to improve conditions in Britain's royal palaces. It took that enlightened and persistent reformer, Albert, Prince Consort. There was room for improvement. In 1844, no less than fifty-three overflowing cesspools were discovered under Windsor Castle. The Prince Consort with characteristic energy attacked the sorry state of affairs, replacing Hanoverian commodes with up-to-date water closets.
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Perhaps it was as a result of his thorough investigation of the conditions in the royal palaces that Prince Albert included in the Great Exhibition of 1851 a wide variety of the latest water closets. But, alas,

with his death there was a tendency to accept the status quo in sanitation as in everything else, so that all might remain as it had been in his lifetime, all in some degree part of one great Albert memorial.

It was not until ten years after his death that the typhoid of the heir to the throne awakened the national conscience to the perils of its smallest rooms and its noisome drains, the reform of which had for years been strenuously urged by such sanitary pioneers as Edwin Chadwick.
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Because the great nobles who held the high offices in the royal Household lived elsewhere, often out of London, there was no supervision, except by the one resident officer, the Master of the Household, who belonged to the Lord Steward's department. But he had no authority over the housekeepers, pages and housemaids, who worked in the Lord Chamberlain's department. Consequently,

As neither the Lord Chamberlain, nor the Master of the Horse, have a regular deputy residing in the palace, more than two thirds of all the male and female servants are left without a master in the house. They can come on and go off duty as they choose, they can remain absent for hours and hours on their days of waiting, or they may commit any excess or irregularity: there is nobody to observe, to correct, or to reprimand them. The various details of internal arrangement, whereon depends the well-being and comfort of the whole establishment, no one is cognisant of or responsible for. There is no officer responsible for the cleanliness, order and security of the rooms and offices throughout the palace. These things are left to providence; and if smoking, drinking, and other irregularities occur in the dormitories, where footmen, &c., sleep ten and twelve in each room, no one can help it.
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