Victoria: A Life Page 3

  Victoria cherished her German ancestry. ‘It shocks the people of England that the Queen takes no notice of her paternal relations, treats English ones as alien and seems to consider her German uncles and cousins as her only kith and kin,’ complained the diarist Charles Greville in 1840. The following year, when her first son was born, the Queen tried to persuade the College of Arms to quarter the royal arms of England with those of his distinguished European forebears and his arms were gazetted as those of the Duke of Saxony – one of the titles which she bestowed (with what legitimacy some would question) upon the future Edward VII.

  It is understandable that members of the House of Lords and their families should have been hypersensitive about the Queen’s Germanic predilections. By European standards, the British ruling classes, although they bore coats of arms and titles, were scarcely of ancient lineage. Very few of them, by European standards, could be seen as aristocratic at all. Few of their titles went back beyond the seventeenth century. Only one of the English dukedoms, that of Norfolk, is medieval,3 and the family which bears the title, the Howards, are descended from mere harbourmasters. Even the ‘royal’ ancestry of the Stewarts was mingled with that of the Medici, Tuscan peasants who enriched themselves as cloth merchants and bankers; aristocratic purists would see even the French monarchy as the offspring of a ‘mésalliance’ over which those of more ancient or exalted lineage took precedence. W. M. Thackeray, author of Vanity Fair, dismissed Coburg as ‘a Pumpernickel state’. It is more amusing, from one perspective, to pretend that England is the centre of the universe, but it was Thackeray, and not the House of Saxe-Coburg, who is made to seem provincial by the use of the epithet.

  Victoria and Albert came out of Europe, and they can only be understood in a European context. For Victoria, although she was born in England and became the figurehead of the British Empire, England was also a place of lifelong exile. She grew up as an immigrant in London. Her mother, who had imperfect English, filled her with all the immigrant uncertainties, as well as hopes; and many of her adult characteristics are based upon the classic immigrant insecurity. For example, her cunning ability to hoard wealth is classic immigrant behaviour, replicated in so many first- and second-generation immigrant families. In America, where everyone started, at one stage or another, as an immigrant, this amassing of money is popularly described as the American Dream. Not having the security of belonging, the immigrant tries to make cash a substitute for being at home. Monarchs who came before Victoria were strapped for cash because the Prime Ministers controlled the purse strings. Victoria was much cleverer at extracting money from the system than either of her two uncle-kings or her forebears had been. By lying low during her widowhood, and by negotiating extraordinarily generous allowances for her offspring from her Prime Ministers, she laid the foundation for the prodigious wealth of the present British Royal Family4 – a mixed blessing for them politically, and in her lifetime a habit which came close to being politically disastrous.

  Hitherto, from 1688 to Queen Victoria’s time, the wealth of Britain had largely been concentrated in the landed classes, though this was changing thanks to the Industrial Revolution. The English ruling classes acquired armorial bearings, built themselves palaces on the ducal scale, and owned huge acreage and princely rents, all of which bolstered their status as ‘aristocrats’. But their ‘aristocracy’ had the naked purpose of acquiring and retaining power. Since 1689, there had been a very simple relation between the Whig families who exercised power and their monarchs. The English and Scottish oligarchy held the power in Britain. They did not do so, as Oliver Cromwell had unsuccessfully tried to do during the 1650s, without a monarch. But they did so having acquired monarchs from the Continent who would do their bidding – first William of Orange, and subsequently the Hanoverian Kurfürsten, so-called electors of the all-but-defunct Holy Roman Empire. Part of the fascination of Victoria’s long reign is found in her partial failure to understand this dynamic, particularly in her widowhood. Successive Prime Ministers had to teach her that she was not an absolute monarch in the continental mould. It was this fact which enabled her successors to continue in place, while those of her descendants and relations who conducted themselves as autocrats in Berlin, for example, or in St Petersburg found themselves deposed.

  The British ruling class, who had beheaded Charles I and sent James II into exile, might clothe majesty with ceremony, but there was no question about who was in charge. Lenin’s fundamental political question – Who? Whom? – was easily answered in Britain in 1819, the year that Victoria was born. Who held control? The landed and titled class. Over whom? The rest of the country. The answer was slightly more complex than this, in so far as the ‘gentry’, having a firm system of primogeniture, had, since medieval times, intermingled with the mercantile and professional classes. Second sons, such as Dick Whittington, had no land or rent to inherit and had been obliged to go to the cities, usually London, to make their fortune. Following the Industrial Revolution in the closing decades of the eighteenth century, Britain had developed new ways to generate wealth, and in the years of Victoria’s reign it would turn out to be necessary greatly to expand ‘the governing class’ to include the magnates of industry and the princes of commerce. Lady Bracknell’s question – ‘Were you born into the purple of commerce or did you rise through the ranks of the aristocracy?’ – was, when it was first posed in Oscar Wilde’s play of 1895, perfectly acute from an economic and political point of view. Power and wealth are the same things, and the British political system evolved to absorb the new super-rich into the ‘aristocracy’, just as it enfranchised the growing middle classes and eventually extended the franchise to all classes. The monarchy remained part of the system – indeed, an integral part. For the older oligarchy it was a bastion against egalitarianism; for the rising crowds of ‘villa conservatives’ and working-class Tories, it was a way of maintaining a continuity with the past, and of avoiding the disruptions of political unrest such as were seen in the revolutions abroad of 1848 and 1870. Even for political progressives in England, the monarchy had its uses – its ritualized status could sanction political change even when this change was radically undermining the power of the House of Lords. (The Liberals would never have completed the extension of the franchise without a monarchy to insist that the Lords made the necessary concessions.)

  So much hung on a monarchy, and much, therefore, hung upon the fitness of the monarch to occupy the throne; much hung upon her understanding of her role. Yet for Victoria herself, as for her future husband, and cousin, there was a quite other understanding of ancestry. The grand dukes and electors and princes of Middle Europe were literally veins carrying down through the history of the Holy Roman Empire the story of European governance. From infancy to old age, Victoria carried around a consciousness of the huge ‘Royal Family’ of Europe from which she sprang, and into which her children would, for the most part, marry. Particularly in her letters to her sister-in-law the Grand Duchess of Saxe-Coburg, which covered most of their grown-up lives, she showed an everlasting awareness of the existence, marriages, births, deaths and life stories of this great cloud of royalties. Throughout her reign, while her Cabinet ministers were wrestling with a changing Britain, a Britain that was expanding its overseas Empire, worrying about the future of Ireland, extending the franchise, allowing and then expanding Free Trade, building schools, reforming the army, noting with a mixture of emotions the growth of the petty-bourgeoisie and the expansion and suffering of the working class, Victoria – caught up with these facts of life as political realities – was also keeping up a constant exchange of news about kings, queens, emperors, grand duchesses, their dynastic rise and fall, their intermarriage and their place in the new scheme of things. At times, when you read this copious correspondence, several letters a week on occasion, you are listening to the monologue of a duchess in Proust. But she was no snob, and her awareness of all these royal figures, major and minor, and her interest in their d
oings, was one way of being aware of European political realities. Victoria, as she grew into the role of the Head of State of the most powerful country in the world, had a relationship with Europe (literally a blood relationship) which was quite different from that of her successive British Governments. While her Prime Ministers and Foreign Secretaries discussed Europe’s future, Victoria was personally related to those at the heart of such discussions. It has been well said that ‘the dispute with Lord Palmerston, for example, was famously that much worse because Victoria and Albert’s truly pan-European family connections provided a communications network rivalling, and very often interfering with that of the Foreign Office’.5As her long reign continued, and as she developed her inherited Coburg skills as a marriage-broker, she found herself the matriarch and grandmother of the majority of European governments, and one has to use historical imagination to recall that this was far more than a ritualized symbol.

  If Marx was right, that ‘the secret of nobility is zoology’,6 this is even truer of royalty. Success in breeding, which Marx saw as the key to aristocratic power and Darwin would erect into the principle of the human dominion over this very planet, lies at the heart of things. Since 1701, the British royal line had depended not merely on the ability to breed, but to breed Protestants. Bismarck, on the opposite end of the political spectrum from Karl Marx, sought to be equally offensive when he said that Sachsen-Coburg was the ‘stud farm of Europe’, but if the crowned heads of the interconnected and international monarchical system needed replenishment, such stud farms were necessary; ‘zoology’ had to be effective, and Coburg, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, was some stud farm.

  Victoria and Albert’s grandmother, dynasty-builder the Duchess Auguste, was beadily aware that she was living in a new Europe. The dynastic and territorial ambitions of Napoleon lay in ruins. And marriage could bring to prominence royal personages who had not necessarily triumphed on the battlefield or inherited extensive domains. Born Auguste of Reuss-Ebersdorf, she was one of the great beauties of her age, painted by Tischbein (Johann Heinrich, the ‘Elder’). The canvas, now in the United States, depicts the eighteen-year-old Auguste, two years before her marriage, as the grieving widow Artemisia, whose great monument to her husband Mausolus gave to the ancient world one of its Seven Wonders, and to the languages of Europe the term ‘mausoleum’. When it is remembered that Auguste’s most celebrated grandchild was to become the inconsolable Widow of Windsor, there seems something prophetic about the painting of the grandmother, still in her youth, gazing mournfully at her husband’s urn. The picture was commissioned by her father Heinrich XXIV, Count of Reuss-Ebersdorf, as an advertisement of her charms on the marriage market. The somewhat porcine Franz of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld (1750–1806), heir to the dukedom of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, was so taken with her that he paid four times the asking price to the painter. In fact, he was forced into a marriage to another woman, the poor sixteen-year-old Sophie Saxe-Hildburghausen, who died seven months after the wedding, leaving him free to marry Auguste.

  Once she had married Franz in 1777, and provided him with seven children, Auguste showed herself to be a matchmaker of formidable energy. In 1795, the German-born Russian Empress Catherine invited Franz and Auguste to the Court of St Petersburg, and they took along their three eldest daughters. It was said that as the three young women arrived for a ball at the Winter Palace, the old Empress and her grandson Constantine were watching them through a window. The eldest daughter, Sophie, tripped on her gown as she emerged from the carriage; the second, Antoinette, anxious not to repeat the tumble, crawled out of the carriage on all fours; the third, Juliane or Jülchen, lifted her skirts and was able to jump out without mishap. ‘All right,’ Constantine said, ‘if it must be so, I’ll have the little monkey. It dances prettily.’ Had Russia developed in a more liberal direction after the Napoleonic Wars, Constantine might well have been chosen as Emperor. In December 1825, when the mutinous troops called for ‘Constantin i Constitutia!’ (‘Constantine and the Constitution!’), the more simple-minded believed that ‘Constitutia’ was the name of his wife. Alas, his marriage to Juliane had long since dissolved when the Decembrists – those who had believed in the possibility of making Russia a constitutional system such as Britain’s – were sent to their long Siberian exile.

  The marriage was not a success. Constantine ‘claimed condescensions from her, such as can scarcely be hinted at’. At fifteen, Jülchen could not cope with the sexual demands of an experienced army officer. By the time she grew up, she sought consolation from other lovers, and, even though he came to Coburg, trying to woo her back as late as 1814, the marriage was really over in 1801.

  Auguste had greater success with the marriage of her son Leopold (1790–1865), who, the year after the combined British and Prussian victory at Waterloo, married Princess Charlotte of Great Britain. Charlotte was the daughter of the Prince Regent – the future George IV. She was the prince’s only legitimate offspring, and she would one day be Queen of England. Her consort would therefore in effect be king, and king of the country which of all the nations in Europe seemed poised – with its triumph over the Emperor Napoleon, with its pioneering of industrial revolution, with its expanding colonies in India – to be master of the victorious future.

  Charlotte, moreover, possessed the advantage not merely of being young, intelligent and beautiful; she was also the daughter of a highly unpopular Prince Regent and niece of his even less attractive brothers. Charlotte was the nation’s bright future, the figure in whom the British people could rest their hopes.

  Leopold had first visited London in 1815, during the victory celebrations after Waterloo, in the entourage of the Russian imperial party. So flooded was the British capital by visiting dignitaries that all the hotels were full, and Leopold’s first lodgings – the only rooms that could be found at short notice – were over a grocer’s shop in Marylebone High Street. This did not deter the young man, then twenty-five, from being invited to all the celebratory parties by the Prince Regent.

  Leopold had inherited his mother’s good looks, and her eye for the main chance. From the ‘zoological’ point of view, the House of Coburg was a perfectly reasonable option for the British Royal Family: they were the right religion – and the Grand Duchess Catherine, sister of the new Emperor Nicholas I – had primed the pump. The Romanovs believed that the Coburgs would be useful allies to the Russians if married into the British Royal Family.7 So the wedding took place. Charlotte was ecstatically happy to be separated from her hated father and to have escaped marriage to some of the truly ugly options, such as the Prince of Orange. It would seem to have been a very happy match, and she was soon pregnant.

  Princess Charlotte suffered two miscarriages, but in 1817, she appeared to be carrying a baby to full term. This was indeed the case. In the light of her previous misfortunes in pregnancy, she was laid up for several weeks before the accouchement. It was to be an important national event; Charlotte was heir presumptive to King George III’s throne and, as always happened when a birth was close to the succession, the chief officers of state were required to be present as witnesses. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Chancellor both made their way to Claremont, Leopold’s house near Esher in Surrey. The Secretary of State for War and the Home Secretary also appeared.

  At nine in the evening on 5 November, a son was stillborn. The princess appeared to receive with tranquillity the knowledge that her infant was dead. She rallied, and took a little food. As evening turned to night, however, it was evident that all was not well. Charlotte complained of singing in her ears; her heart palpitated and she had violent stomach pains. She felt extremely cold, and however many blankets and hot-water bottles were provided, she shivered convulsively. Since she was haemorrhaging internally, nothing could have been more disastrous than to apply heat to her body. At 2.30 am on 6 November 1817, Princess Charlotte died.

  It was an event which caused intense national shock. G
eorge III was still alive, but the question of the succession now posed itself insistently. In the immediate future, there was no danger of the line actually fizzling to nothing. Of his fifteen children, twelve survived; but the youngest of these, Princess Sophia, was forty years old, and the only hope of breeding a new heir rested with the sons. The Prince Regent – destined to inherit the throne in 1820 – was out of the running; he was long estranged from his wife, Caroline of Brunswick. The Duke of York, whose German wife was immured in the English countryside, had no hope of a legitimate child. He was fifty-four years old, and deeply involved with a middle-aged mistress. The next in line, William, Duke of Clarence, had suffered no difficulty in producing children. He had ten of them, by the celebrated comedienne Mrs Jordan, but none were legitimate. The Duke of Kent, aged fifty, had been living a quasi-marital existence, very fondly, with his French-Canadian mistress Madame de Saint-Laurent for the last twenty-four years, and even if she were to be made his lawful wife, she was too old to have children. The Duke of Sussex had twice defied the Royal Marriages Act by taking wives without his father’s consent. Neither the Duke of Cumberland nor the Duke of Cambridge, at the time of Charlotte’s death, had any legitimate successors.