Queen's House (28 page)

Prince Albert's was the simplest of private funerals, held at St George's Chapel, Windsor, on a chill day, under a leaden sky. There was none of the paraphernalia of mourning, but his coffin was followed by his brother, Ernest, Duke of Saxe-Coburg, the Prince of Wales and little Prince Arthur, all three racked by uncontrollable grief. Prince Albert had been a demanding perfectionist, but their tear-stained faces witnessed deep love and a profound sense of loss.

The Queen was not there. She had been taken to Osborne, from where she sent a simple wreath of violets round a white camellia. Leopold, King of the Belgians, immediately offered to come to her. On 20 December she replied like a broken child:

My
own
DEAREST KINDEST
Father
– For as such have I ever loved you! The poor fatherless baby of eight months is now the utterly broken-hearted and crushed widow of forty-two. My life as a happy one is
ended
! The world is gone for me … it is henceforth for our poor fatherless children – for my unhappy country, which has lost
all
in losing him … and in
only
doing what I know and feel – he would wish, for he is near me – his spirit will guide and inspire me…,
⁸⁹

Before he came, on 26 December, she wrote again, this time to emphasize that ‘no human power will make me swerve from what he decided'. And she was determined that ‘no person, may he be ever so good … is to lead or guide me'
⁹⁰
– a hint perhaps that her beloved uncle should not try to dominate again.

She was much soothed by Alfred, Lord Tennyson's dedication to his new edition of his
Idylls of the King:

… we see him as he moved,
How modest, kindly, all-accomplish'd wise,
With what sublime suppression of himself…
… but thro' all this tract of years
Wearing the white flower of a blameless life,
Before a thousand peering littlenesses,
In that fierce light that beats upon a throne …
Hereafter, thro' all times, Albert the Good.

Baron Stockmar, heartbroken, wrote honest words that she would remember all her life. ‘You will grow accustomed to it, but you will never get over it.'
⁹¹
And she never did.

Albert, Prince of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, with the help of Baron Stockmar of Coburg, had transformed Buckingham Palace and in so doing had contributed stability and prestige to the monarchy, which it had lacked during the reigns of Queen Victoria's uncles.

The Widow of Windsor

In the following year, however, the invisible ‘widow of Windsor' threatened to destroy their work. Stockmar would have told her that an unseen monarch diminishes the monarchy and that an expensive but unused palace rouses republicans.

For two years she remained in seclusion at Osborne and for twenty years she was seen little in public. Buckingham Palace was deserted and shuttered, the state rooms shrouded in dust sheets, although she allowed her sons, Princes Alfred and Leopold, to have apartments on the second floor. She spent long periods in Balmoral and received her ministers at Windsor. She obstinately refused to delegate work to her eldest son. When on 5 March 1863 the Prince of Wales married Princess Alexandra, the longed-for wedding took place at St George's Chapel, Windsor, but the Queen watched from a dark closet, high above the altar, and did not attend the breakfast. Even after his marriage she refused to allow him to take over Buckingham Palace.

When Queen Victoria's beloved Uncle Leopold died on 10 December 1865, she lost a surrogate father and a lifelong pillar of support. Now she was truly alone. For a while, in her isolation she thought she would go mad; she longed for death.

Gradually, however, that tough spirit that had saved her before she knew Prince Albert reawakened and with it her own intelligence, so long subordinated to that of the Prince. Driven by that royal sense of duty which had impelled even her predecessors, she gradually took up again the work of a queen. Queen Victoria emerged Queen in her own right, standing on her own feet. But she desperately missed a strong right arm, which she found, surprisingly, in her Scottish ghillie John Brown, who combined ‘the offices of groom, footman, page and
maid
I almost might say, as he is so handy about cloaks and shawls'. In February 1865 she decided that he should ‘remain permanently and make himself useful in other ways besides leading my pony as he is so very dependable'.
⁹²
He began with a wage of £120 a year; later it was raised to £310.

So John Brown became an essential part of the Court, to the displeasure of the rest of the Household. John Brown was always there – behind her chair, on the box of her carriage, handing the Queen her shawl. Honest and outspoken, he was what she needed, but he infuriated ministers and courtiers with his presumption. Her relationship with him is a constant theme for gossip-mongers, but anyone who has studied the character of the Queen or her times can have no doubt that Queen Victoria would never have allowed the relationship to have overstepped the boundary between mistress and servant. It was the kind of friendship that kings and queens often have with devoted servants with whom they are totally at ease and who give them constant support.

Queen Victoria had, too, the help of her equerry, Henry Ponsonby, who became her Private Secretary in 1870. He gave her years of loyal service until January 1895, when a severe stroke released him. He was wise, dedicated and honourable, with the great gift of humour. He was succeeded by Colonel Arthur Bigge, who stayed with her until her death.

To the annoyance of the public, she shunned public appearances. It
was not until 6 February 1866 that she consented to open Parliament, but then she drove from Buckingham Palace in her carriage, not the state coach, and took her place on the throne, silent, veiled in black, wearing not a crown but her black widow's cap, leaving the Lord Chancellor to read her speech.

Two years later she consented to open Parliament again. She drove once again from Buckingham Palace in her ordinary carriage – with the windows lowered so that she could be seen; but she was angered by the shouts of demonstrators and the fury in their ‘nasty faces'. This time her speech from the throne announced her government's intention to pass the Second Reform Bill. Once again she could not wait to leave the Palace and London. Prince Albert's rooms in Buckingham Palace were kept exactly as he left them, but his spirit was not there.

From 1864, she began holding afternoon receptions at the Palace, and in 1868, gave her first ‘breakfast' – as garden parties at the Palace were called – since she was becoming aware that her critics were growing. Why, they asked, should the taxpayers pay for a Palace that was so underused? Again and again successive Prime Ministers urged her to use Buckingham Palace – or at least to let the Prince and Princess of Wales live there. But the Queen was adamant. Bertie could not take her place: she remembered too vividly the stories of the Prince Regent's behaviour during her grandfather's illness and Bertie showed alarming signs of the family inheritance.

Prime Minister Gladstone managed to persuade her to receive the Shah of Persia at Windsor in 1873 and to invite him to stay at Buckingham Palace. She wore her Koh-i-noor diamond to impress him at the Windsor banquet, but it was just as well that she did not receive him personally at Buckingham Palace. She heard, without amusement, of his entourage of lovely ladies, of his feasts of roasted lamb spread on her priceless carpets and how he watched a boxing match in the Palace garden.

In spite of her dislike of public appearances, the Queen was determined to maintain the prestige of the British monarchy. When her son, Prince Alfred, became engaged to Marie, the only daughter of the Tsar of Russia, she was infuriated at the Tsar's suggestion that she should go
to Cologne to meet Marie. To the Queen's daughter Princess Alice, who encouraged her to go, she raged,

I do not think dear child that
you
should tell
me
who have been nearly 20 years longer on the throne than the Emperor of Russia, and am the doyenne of Sovereigns and who am a reigning Sovereign which the Empress is not –
what I ought to do.
The proposal received on Wednesday for me to be at Cologne …
Tomorrow
was one of the coolest things I ever heard.
⁹³

Victoria Regina et Imperatrix

It was Disraeli who brought the Queen back into the public eye. She had been fascinated by him ever since 1852 when, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he sent her Parliamentary reports that were ‘just like his novels'. Queen Victoria had no racial prejudice and rebuffed the antiSemitic gibes directed at the brilliant young Jew.

When, in February 1868, at the age of sixty-four, Disraeli succeeded Lord Derby as Prime Minister, the Queen applauded. ‘A proud thing', she wrote to Vicky, ‘for a man risen from the people to have attained.'
⁹⁴

With consummate skill Disraeli wooed the Queen back to life, encouraged her to take her ladies for a holiday to Switzerland and explained politics to her, making her feel once again in the centre of affairs. In return she sent him primroses from Osborne.

When he was replaced by Gladstone, she was as distressed as she had been when Melbourne had lost power. Her antipathy to the Grand Old Man has been often described. It was Disraeli who was her favourite. On 10 February 1874 he was back again as her Prime Minister.

When in 1876 the Queen decided she wished to be Empress of India, Disraeli encouraged her even though there was fierce opposition in Parliament.

Prosaic and sensible though the Queen was, there was also in her a latent love of the exotic. Though she had disliked Brighton, she was surrounded by oriental fantasies brought from the Pavilion; and she never forgot her wild ride as a girl of seven when the old George IV
had scooped her up in his carriage and whirled her to his magical Chinese pagoda on the shores of Virginia Water.

Her immediate desire was to outdo the Tsar of Russia and to secure the place of the Queen of England in the precedence charts of the world. On New Year's Day 1877 Queen Victoria signed herself ‘Victoria Regina et Imperatrix'. She had taken her place in the world again, and this time without the help of Uncle Leopold, Stockmar or Prince Albert. Disraeli next laid at the imperial feet the high road to India: the Suez Canal, which on 25 November 1877 he snapped up from the bankrupt Khedive of Egypt for a bargain £4 million. Skilfully he fed Queen Victoria's renewed enthusiasm for the great world destiny of Britain. The imperial triumph had begun.

In the last forty years of her reign Queen Victoria established the morals and manners of her Court in the pattern that Prince Albert – and Stockmar – had set down. In 1854 the Baron had written that he had watched the Court for twenty-eight years and had learned the value of the moral purity of the sovereign ‘as moral oil for the driving wheels of the constitutional machine'.
⁹⁵

The ‘moral oil' could often become a sickening syrup and there was undoubtedly much hypocrisy in Queen Victoria's Court, but certainly in the stability of her last years the magic of monarchy shone as never before. That stability contributed to the fact that at the end of her reign Buckingham Palace was established as the seat of majesty and a unifying symbol for the nation.

Her rules were strict, as Prince Albert had demanded. Gouty old ministers stood painfully in her presence; princes smoked their cigars up the chimney in the privacy of their bedrooms, or sucked lozenges to conceal their sinful tobacco. Courtiers still had to learn the difficult art of walking backwards, and froze in their chilly rooms. The first duty of a courtier was to the Queen: wives had to put up with much loneliness – indeed she did not like her courtiers getting married at all. When her physician, Sir James Reid, became engaged to one of her Maids of Honour without asking her permission, she did not speak to him for days. How could a physician devote himself to two ladies? But his polite reply that he would not do it again turned away her wrath in laughter.

Rules of Court protocol and etiquette were strictly observed, and Court life was described
ad nauseam
by the authors of such guides as
Court Etiquette,
and Court circulars.
Manners and Rules of Good Society,
by a member of the aristocracy, was a much thumbed rule book at the end of the reign. In excruciating language the author reported that ‘guests were graciously invited to partake of a collation, and … the Queen was humbly wished “an auspicious return of her natal day”.'
⁹⁶

It was a pity that Queen Victoria, who prided herself on being Queen of all her people, should have allowed herself to be so hemmed in by rigid rules. The honour of attending her Court was open only to the nobility and gentry, and to officers of the armed services, clergy, lawyers, doctors and professional men. Those who engaged in trade were excluded – unless they were merchant princes or bankers. As far as trade was concerned a ‘line is drawn and very strictly so'.

The Lord Chamberlain, who was responsible for issuing ‘royal commands', as invitations to state occasions were called, also expected ladies and gentlemen to conform to certain rules of dress. For ladies ‘the regulation respecting low bodices is absolute', unless a doctor's certificate could be produced. Unmarried ladies were expected to wear white and all should have trains not less than three and a half yards in length, and wear a head dress of three white plumes.

Ladies had to learn the difficult art of managing a bouquet, a train and a curtsey with grace. At drawing rooms ladies held their trains out, and dropped them when they approached the Queen. Officers with white wands spread out the trains and scooped them up again after presentation. ‘Train teas' after the drawing rooms were popular social occasions, when the Queen's guests could show off their Court finery to friends.