Shooting Victoria (49 page)

… we are told that a limited Monarchy works well. I set aside, in this speech, the question of whether a Republic would work better; but I confess freely that I doubt whether, if the charges to which I have to-night alluded are well founded, the monarchy should not set its house in order. (Loud applause.) There is a widespread belief that a Republic here is only a matter of education and time. (Great cheering.) It is said that some day a Commonwealth will be our Government.… Well, if you can show me a fair chance that a Republic here will be free from the political corruption that hangs about the Monarchy, I say, for my part—and I believe the middle classes in general will say—let it come. (Cheers.)

Within days, newspapers across the nation reported—and for the most part, reviled—Dilke's speech. Victoria herself was furious, both that such deplorable political sentiments could be uttered in public by a Member of Parliament, and that the government itself—a Liberal government in 1871, to whose policies Dilke, the radical member from Chelsea, largely adhered—did little to nothing to contradict or condemn Dilke's words. Two weeks after the speech, she wrote to her Prime Minister, William Gladstone, deploring the recent spate of “Gross misstatements & fabrications injurious to the credit of the Queen & to the Monarchy” and asking “whether he or at least some of his Colleagues shld not take an opportunity of reprobating in very strong terms such language.”

Replying solicitously, Gladstone suggested that responding strongly to republican views would lend them a gravity they did not deserve, and would tend “to exasperate and harden such persons as composed the Newcastle Meeting.” Nonetheless, he assured the Queen that he considered the matter one of “grave
public importance.” It certainly was. In 1871, republicanism as an ideology and a movement threatened Victoria's monarchy more than it had at any other time since she took the throne. While it was true that only a minority of her subjects were republicans, “a few years ago,” Gladstone reminded the Queen, “that minority (so far as he knows) did not exist,” and “the causes … that have brought it into existence may lead to its growth.” In 1871, republicanism had become “a distemper,” as Gladstone put it, and the “Royalty question” was one of the most vexing problems with which his ministry had to deal.

There were many causes for the unpopularity of the monarchy and the growing sense that it might simply be dispensed with. The economy had slumped since 1866, and unemployment was high, particularly in London where it was exacerbated by an influx of migrants from the countryside. The growing trend toward democracy, demonstrated in the landmark Reform Act of 1867, which nearly doubled eligible voters and dipped eligibility down to a much larger segment of the urban working class, created among many an urge for more. The fall of Emperor Louis Napoleon (now in exile in England) and the establishment of a French Republic led to the spontaneous generation of dozens of republican clubs across the nation: ready-made and enthusiastic audiences for republican speakers such as Charles Bradlaugh and trade union leader George Odger.

But much more than Bradlaugh, Odger, or Napoleon III, it was the royal family, and particularly Victoria herself, who had produced this, the strongest surge of republicanism in the nineteenth century. They themselves had done much to make the monarchy appear useless. “To speak in rude and general terms,” Gladstone had put it the year before, “the Queen is invisible, and the Prince of Wales is not respected.” By 1871, the relationship with the British public, which Victoria had so carefully cultured in the first part of her reign, had been broken—had indeed shattered a decade before, at the end of Victoria's
annus horribilus
of 1861.

Victoria's family was complete then, her ninth and last child, Beatrice, having been born in 1857. And Albert in 1861 was still Victoria's all-in-all—still her best friend, closest adviser, and the unrelenting (though increasingly exhausted) champion of her monarchy. The once-hated Lord Palmerston was their Prime Minister then, but their conflict with him had ceased when he took the reigns of government during the Crimean War and conducted business completely in accord with their views. But the happiest decade of Victoria's life, which began with the Exhibition year of 1851, came to an abrupt end on 16 March 1861, when her mother, the Duchess of Kent, died at Frogmore of cancer. Victoria was plunged immediately into a chasm of grief, and then into a long-lasting depression, from which Albert devoted much of the rest of the year weaning her.

In 1861, the oldest of the royal children were reaching maturity. Vicky, Princess Royal, had in 1858 at seventeen married Frederick William of Prussia. Their first son Willie (the future Kaiser) was born a year later. Bertie, the Prince of Wales, nineteen years old in 1861, had been from early childhood a source of great concern for his parents. From his earliest childhood it had become clear, to their mortification, that any Saxe-Coburg traits—that is, his father's manifold and unparalleled virtues—were absent in the boy, and that he was, rather, utterly a Hanoverian, reflecting the worst of his mother's uncles' vices—sensuality, intemperance, and indolence among them. Albert was determined to train the Hanoverian vices out of his son with a rigorous course of study; any attempts by Bertie to rebel were met by his tutors—with Albert's encouragement—with boxed ears or a rap across the knuckles with a stick. More than this, his parents, having forgotten the misery Victoria had gone through under the restrictive Kensington system, set severe limits on Bertie's social contacts. Bertie spent the first part of 1861 in oversupervised study at Christ's College, Oxford, and for the last part of the year he faced more of the same at Trinity College, Cambridge. During the intervening summer
break, however, he enjoyed an element of freedom while training with the Grenadier Guards at Curragh Camp in Ireland, having there what was likely his first sexual experience, as one night some boisterous fellow officers smuggled Nellie Clifden, a young actress, into his quarters. A brief affair ensued.

Under the prevailing double standard of the time, such wild oat-sowing on the part of sons would typically be tolerated by most parents as a (perhaps unfortunate) fact of life. But Bertie was in no way typical—he was the heir to the throne, and the son, as far as his mother was concerned, of the paragon among men. Albert considered Bertie's disgusting liaison to be the crowning one of all of Bertie's disappointments, proof positive that Albert's efforts to train his son away from the excesses of his Hanover uncles had failed. More than this, Albert despairingly considered that all of his life's work of restoring the prestige of the monarchy had been undone by his son virtually overnight. The affair, thanks to Nellie's boasting, had been the talk of all London before it reached Windsor Castle. When Albert learned of and confirmed the story at the beginning of November, he wrote his son an anguished letter “upon a subject which has caused me the greatest pain I have yet felt in this life.” Albert accused his son of surrendering the entire reputation of the royal family to an actress. What if Clifden was pregnant? If the Prince of Wales denied paternity, she could take him to court, and “she could be able to give before a greedy multitude disgusting details of your profligacy for the sake of convincing the Jury, yourself cross-examined by a railing indecent attorney and hooted and yelled at by a Lawless Mob! Oh, horrible prospect which this person has in her power, any day to realise! and to break your poor parents' hearts!”

Albert's heartsickness conspired with overwork, many sleepless nights, nervous strain, and almost certainly the effects of a long-lasting illness to undermine his health and sap his will to live. On the twenty-second of November, he traveled to the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst to inspect buildings in the pouring rain;
three days later, with a cold and feverish and confessing to his diary “bin recht elend” (“I am very wretched”), he traveled to Cambridge to confront his son. Bertie was abjectly contrite, and Albert forgave him. But the Prince Consort returned to Windsor exhausted and ill. His symptoms persisted and worsened; by the end of November he was near collapse, and was soon diagnosed with typhoid fever.

Albert was dutiful until nearly the end, rendering on the first of December perhaps his greatest service to the nation. In early November, a ship of the U.S. Navy had intercepted a British ship, the
Trent
, and forcibly removed two Confederate diplomats and their secretaries from the ship. In response, Palmerston and Foreign Minister John Russell drew up a bellicose communication demanding reparation and an apology—a letter which would virtually guarantee a warlike response from the Americans. Albert revised the letter, softening the accusation and offering Lincoln's government a face-saving way out. In doing so, he quite possibly prevented the American Civil War from flaring up into an Anglo-American war.

The Prince had moments of improvement during the next two weeks, but he knew he was dying. On Friday the thirteenth of December, a telegram brought the Prince of Wales rushing to Windsor from Cambridge. The family gathered around his deathbed, Victoria forcing herself to remain calm in her husband's presence. The next day, he slowly and peacefully faded and died. Victoria immediately collapsed in shock. “I stood up,” she wrote, “kissed his dear heavenly forehead & called out in a bitter and agonising cry ‘Oh! my dear Darling!' and then dropped on my knees in mute, distracted despair, unable to utter a word or shed a tear!” In that instant, she experienced a soul-crushing grief and the beginning of a nervous breakdown, an affliction from which she never fully recovered during the forty years remaining to her. That unceasing grief became manifest in the state of mourning into which the Court was thrown, mourning that abated with time but never ceased until she herself died. Albert, so intent upon
establishing his co-rulership in the early years of his marriage, had succeeded only too well. He had indeed become her all-in-all; without him she had nothing, could do nothing, was in her own mind nothing. She had not realized, she wrote to her daughter Vicky, “how I, who leant on him for all and everything—without whom I did nothing, moved not a finger, arranged not a print or photograph, didn't put on a gown or bonnet if he didn't approve it shall be able to go on, to live, to move, and help myself in difficult moments.…” With Albert gone, Victoria's monarchy immediately became a vacuum. Bertie was there for her, of course: telling her, moments after Albert's death, “I will be all I can to you,” to which she responded “I am sure, my dear boy, you will,” kissing him over and over. But Bertie, she knew, could not hope to be a tenth of the man his father had been. And the Queen was certain that Bertie's behavior had been the cause of his father's illness and death: she admitted to Vicky that she could not look at him without shuddering. She would never allow him the influence or involvement in her government that his father had had.

For the rest of the decade, Victoria became the nation's real-life Miss Havisham, pathologically desiring seclusion from society.
*
Losing Albert, she told her ministers, had shattered her nerves and destroyed her health, preventing her from public appearances. She adamantly resisted being “dictated to, or teased by public clamour into doing what she physically CANNOT, and she expects Ministers to protect her from such attempts.” She was assisted greatly by her physician-extraordinary, William Jenner, who essentially prescribed that Victoria suspend her public duties, and in 1867 warned Prime Minister Lord Derby that “any great departure from her usual”—that is, isolated—”way of life or more than ordinary agitation, might produce insanity.” At first, her need for isolation ran so deep that she would not meet face to face with her Privy
Council, sitting instead in one room as her councilors stood and shouted their business through the open door of an adjoining room. Her public appearances ceased altogether for a time, and then were rare, usually limited to inspecting or unveiling monuments to dear Albert. London, a place she had once loved, and which Albert had taught her to dislike, she now loathed, with its noises, its crowds, and the relentless demand of the people there that she display herself. She managed to avoid residence at Buckingham Palace altogether for years after 1861, visiting the place only once in the year after Albert's death, in a visit so secret that her own servants did not know she was there. “I saw enough,” she wrote to her daughter Vicky, “to feel I never can live there again except for two or three days at a time.” And for the next decade she was as good as her word, preferring the briefest of visits to the capital in day trips from Windsor. Her shunning of the metropolis was lost on no one. In 1864, a wry placard was attached to the gates of Buckingham Palace: “These commanding premises to be let or sold, in consequence of the late occupant's declining business.”

Whenever she could, Victoria delegated to her older children appearances at State ceremonies, the levées, and drawing rooms. When Bertie married Alix—Alexandra of Denmark—in 1863 (a wedding that the Queen did her best to transform into a funeral), the Princess of Wales substituted for her at presentations at Court. In response to reports in the press in 1864 that she planned again to take up these functions, Victoria took the unprecedented step of writing personally to the
Times
, protesting that duties “higher than those of mere representation”—that is, her dispatches and meeting with her ministers—were as much as her health and strength could bear. “To call upon her to undergo … the fatigue of those mere State ceremonies which can be equally well performed by other members of the family is to ask her to run the risk of entirely disabling herself.…” She rarely consented to open Parliament, generally (and grudgingly) doing so when annuities or dowries for her children were to be voted upon.

What Court there was in the 1860s was provided by the Prince and Princess of Wales, who maintained a busy public presence in London from Marlborough House, their mansion on Pall Mall. As Bertie tartly wrote to his mother in 1868, “we have certain duties to fulfill here, and your absence from London makes it more necessary that we should do all we can for society, trade, and public matters.” But the Prince of Wales had done his own part in creating the “royalty question.” Though he had taken over much of his father's committee work, Victoria adamantly opposed his playing any important role in government. The dispatches which kept her so busy were closed to him. He thus appeared to the public—with his balls, country-house visits, frequent trips to the racetrack, and rumors of assignations, to be little more than a royal pleasure-seeker, maintained at the government expense. His reputation was particularly tarnished in 1870 when he was subpoenaed in a divorce case by his friend Sir Charles Mordaunt, accused of being one of several lovers of Mordaunt's wife. Sir Charles's petition failed, but the damage had been done. The Queen, who believed unreservedly in her son's innocence, still maintained “the whole remains a painful lowering thing … because his name ought never to have been dragged in the dirt, or mixed up with such people.” For months after the case, the Prince and his wife were hissed as they drove in public, in the theatres, at Ascot. Scurrilous stories circulated about Bertie's private life.