Queen Victoria — Chapter 9, part 1

I

Meanwhile in Victoria's private life many changes and developments had taken place.

With the marriages of her elder children her family circle widened; grandchildren appeared; and a multitude of new domestic interests sprang up.

The death of King Leopold in 1865 had removed the predominant figure of the older generation, and the functions he had performed as the centre and adviser of a large group of relatives in Germany and in England devolved upon Victoria.

These functions she discharged with unremitting industry, carrying on an enormous correspondence, and following with absorbed interest every detail in the lives of the ever-ramifying cousinhood.

And she tasted to the full both the joys and the pains of family affection.

She took a particular delight in her grandchildren, to whom she showed an indulgence which their parents had not always enjoyed, though, even to her grandchildren, she could be, when the occasion demanded it, severe.

The eldest of them, the little Prince Wilhelm of Prussia, was a remarkably headstrong child;

he dared to be impertinent even to his grandmother; and once, when she told him to bow to a visitor at Osborne, he disobeyed her outright.

This would not do: the order was sternly repeated, and the naughty boy, noticing that his grandmama had suddenly turned into a most terrifying lady, submitted his will to hers, and bowed very low indeed.

It would have been well if all the Queen's domestic troubles could have been got over as easily.

Among her more serious distresses was the conduct of the Prince of Wales.

The young man was now independent and married; he had shaken the parental yoke from his shoulders; he was positively beginning to do as he liked.

Victoria was much perturbed, and her worst fears seemed to be justified when in 1870 he appeared as a witness in a society divorce case.

It was clear that the heir to the throne had been mixing with people of whom she did not at all approve.

What was to be done?

She saw that it was not only her son that was to blame--that it was the whole system of society; and so she despatched a letter to Mr. Delane, the editor of The Times, asking him if he would "frequently WRITE articles pointing out the IMMENSE danger and evil of the wretched frivolity and levity of the views and lives of the Higher Classes."

And five years later Mr. Delane did write an article upon that very subject.

Yet it seemed to have very little effect.

Ah!

if only the Higher Classes would learn to live as she lived in the domestic sobriety of her sanctuary at Balmoral!

For more and more did she find solace and refreshment in her Highland domain; and twice yearly, in the spring and in the autumn, with a sigh of relief, she set her face northwards, in spite of the humble protests of Ministers, who murmured vainly in the royal ears that to transact the affairs of State over an interval of six hundred miles added considerably to the cares of government.

Her ladies, too, felt occasionally a slight reluctance to set out, for, especially in the early days, the long pilgrimage was not without its drawbacks.

For many years the Queen's conservatism forbade the continuation of the railway up Deeside, so that the last stages of the journey had to be accomplished in carriages.

But, after all, carriages had their good points; they were easy, for instance, to get in and out of, which was an important consideration, for the royal train remained for long immune from modern conveniences, and when it drew up, on some border moorland, far from any platform, the highbred dames were obliged to descend to earth by the perilous foot-board, the only pair of folding steps being reserved for Her Majesty's saloon.

In the days of crinolines such moments were sometimes awkward; and it was occasionally necessary to summon Mr. Johnstone, the short and sturdy Manager of the Caledonian Railway, who, more than once, in a high gale and drenching rain with great difficulty "pushed up"--as he himself described it--some unlucky Lady Blanche or Lady Agatha into her compartment.

But Victoria cared for none of these things.

She was only intent upon regaining, with the utmost swiftness, her enchanted Castle, where every spot was charged with memories, where every memory was sacred, and where life was passed in an incessant and delightful round of absolutely trivial events.

And it was not only the place that she loved; she was equally attached to "the simple mountaineers," from whom, she said, "she learnt many a lesson of resignation and faith."

Smith and Grant and Ross and Thompson--she was devoted to them all; but, beyond the rest, she was devoted to John Brown.

The Prince's gillie had now become the Queen's personal attendant--a body servant from whom she was never parted, who accompanied her on her drives, waited on her during the day, and slept in a neighbouring chamber at night.

She liked his strength, his solidity, the sense he gave her of physical security; she even liked his rugged manners and his rough unaccommodating speech.

She allowed him to take liberties with her which would have been unthinkable from anybody else.

To bully the Queen, to order her about, to reprimand her--who could dream of venturing upon such audacities?

And yet, when she received such treatment from John Brown, she positively seemed to enjoy it.

The eccentricity appeared to be extraordinary; but, after all, it is no uncommon thing for an autocratic dowager to allow some trusted indispensable servant to adopt towards her an attitude of authority which is jealously forbidden to relatives or friends: the power of a dependent still remains, by a psychological sleight-of-hand, one's own power, even when it is exercised over oneself.

When Victoria meekly obeyed the abrupt commands of her henchman to get off her pony or put on her shawl, was she not displaying, and in the highest degree, the force of her volition?

People might wonder; she could not help that; this was the manner in which it pleased her to act, and there was an end of it.

To have submitted her judgment to a son or a Minister might have seemed wiser or more natural; but if she had done so, she instinctively felt, she would indeed have lost her independence.

And yet upon somebody she longed to depend.

Her days were heavy with the long process of domination.

As she drove in silence over the moors she leaned back in the carriage, oppressed and weary; but what a relief--John Brown was behind on the rumble, and his strong arm would be there for her to lean upon when she got out.

He had, too, in her mind, a special connection with Albert.

In their expeditions the Prince had always trusted him more than anyone; the gruff, kind, hairy Scotsman was, she felt, in some mysterious way, a legacy from the dead.

She came to believe at last--or so it appeared--that the spirit of Albert was nearer when Brown was near.

Often, when seeking inspiration over some complicated question of political or domestic import, she would gaze with deep concentration at her late husband's bust.

But it was also noticed that sometimes in such moments of doubt and hesitation Her Majesty's looks would fix themselves upon John Brown.

Eventually, the "simple mountaineer" became almost a state personage.

The influence which he wielded was not to be overlooked.

Lord Beaconsfield was careful, from time to time, to send courteous messages to "Mr. Brown" in his letters to the Queen, and the French Government took particular pains to provide for his comfort during the visits of the English Sovereign to France.

It was only natural that among the elder members of the royal family he should not have been popular, and that his failings--for failings he had, though Victoria would never notice his too acute appreciation of Scotch whisky--should have been the subject of acrimonious comment at Court.

But he served his mistress faithfully, and to ignore him would be a sign of disrespect to her biographer.

For the Queen, far from making a secret of her affectionate friendship, took care to publish it to the world.

By her orders two gold medals were struck in his honour; on his death, in 1883, a long and eulogistic obituary notice of him appeared in the Court Circular; and a Brown memorial brooch--of gold, with the late gillie's head on one side and the royal monogram on the other--was designed by Her Majesty for presentation to her Highland servants and cottagers, to be worn by them on the anniversary of his death, with a mourning scarf and pins.

In the second series of extracts from the Queen's Highland Journal, published in 1884, her "devoted personal attendant and faithful friend" appears upon almost every page, and is in effect the hero of the book.

With an absence of reticence remarkable in royal persons, Victoria seemed to demand, in this private and delicate matter, the sympathy of the whole nation; and yet--such is the world--there were those who actually treated the relations between their Sovereign and her servant as a theme for ribald jests.

II

The busy years hastened away; the traces of Time's unimaginable touch grew manifest; and old age, approaching, laid a gentle hold upon Victoria.

The grey hair whitened; the mature features mellowed; the short firm figure amplified and moved more slowly, supported by a stick.

And, simultaneously, in the whole tenour of the Queen's existence an extraordinary transformation came to pass.

The nation's attitude towards her, critical and even hostile as it had been for so many years, altogether changed; while there was a corresponding alteration in the temper of--Victoria's own mind.

Many causes led to this result.

Among them were the repeated strokes of personal misfortune which befell the Queen during a cruelly short space of years.

In 1878 the Princess Alice, who had married in 1862 the Prince Louis of Hesse-Darmstadt, died in tragic circumstances.

In the following year the Prince Imperial, the only son of the Empress Eugenie, to whom Victoria, since the catastrophe of 1870, had become devotedly attached, was killed in the Zulu War.

Two years later, in 1881, the Queen lost Lord Beaconsfield, and, in 1883, John Brown.

In 1884 the Prince Leopold, Duke of Albany, who had been an invalid from birth, died prematurely, shortly after his marriage.

Victoria's cup of sorrows was indeed overflowing; and the public, as it watched the widowed mother weeping for her children and her friends, displayed a constantly increasing sympathy.

An event which occurred in 1882 revealed and accentuated the feelings of the nation.

As the Queen, at Windsor, was walking from the train to her carriage, a youth named Roderick Maclean fired a pistol at her from a distance of a few yards.

An Eton boy struck up Maclean's arm with an umbrella before the pistol went off; no damage was done, and the culprit was at once arrested.

This was the last of a series of seven attempts upon the Queen--attempts which, taking place at sporadic intervals over a period of forty years, resembled one another in a curious manner.

All, with a single exception, were perpetrated by adolescents, whose motives were apparently not murderous, since, save in the case of Maclean, none of their pistols was loaded.

These unhappy youths, who, after buying their cheap weapons, stuffed them with gunpowder and paper, and then went off, with the certainty of immediate detection, to click them in the face of royalty, present a strange problem to the psychologist.

But, though in each case their actions and their purposes seemed to be so similar, their fates were remarkably varied.

The first of them, Edward Oxford, who fired at Victoria within a few months of her marriage, was tried for high treason, declared to be insane, and sent to an asylum for life.

It appears, however, that this sentence did not commend itself to Albert, for when, two years later, John Francis committed the same of fence, and was tried upon the same charge, the Prince propounced that there was no insanity in the matter.

"The wretched creature," he told his father, was "not out of his mind, but a thorough scamp."

"I hope," he added, "his trial will be conducted with the greatest strictness."

Apparently it was; at any rate, the jury shared the view of the Prince, the plea of insanity was, set aside, and Francis was found guilty of high treason and condemned to death; but, as there was no proof of an intent to kill or even to wound, this sentence, after a lengthened deliberation between the Home Secretary and the Judges, was commuted for one of transportation for life.

As the law stood, these assaults, futile as they were, could only be treated as high treason; the discrepancy between the actual deed and the tremendous penalties involved was obviously grotesque; and it was, besides, clear that a jury, knowing that a verdict of guilty implied a sentence of death, would tend to the alternative course, and find the prisoner not guilty but insane--a conclusion which, on the face of it, would have appeared to be the more reasonable.

In 1842, therefore, an Act was passed making any attempt to hurt the Queen a misdemeanor, punishable by transportation for seven years, or imprisonment, with or without hard labour, for a term not exceeding three years--the misdemeanant, at the discretion of the Court, "to be publicly or privately whipped, as often, and in such manner and form, as the Court shall direct, not exceeding thrice."

The four subsequent attempts were all dealt with under this new law; William Bean, in 1842, was sentenced to eighteen months' imprisonment; William Hamilton, in 1849, was transported for seven years; and, in 1850, the same sentence was passed upon Lieutenant Robert Pate, who struck the Queen on the head with his cane in Piccadilly.

Pate, alone among these delinquents, was of mature years; he had held a commission in the Army, dressed himself as a dandy, and was, the Prince declared, "manifestly deranged."

In 1872 Arthur O'Connor, a youth of seventeen, fired an unloaded pistol at the Queen outside Buckingham Palace; he was immediately seized by John Brown, and sentenced to one year's imprisonment and twenty strokes of the birch rod.

It was for his bravery upon this occasion that Brown was presented with one of his gold medals.

In all these cases the jury had refused to allow the plea of insanity;

but Roderick Maclean's attempt in 1882 had a different issue.

On this occasion the pistol was found to have been loaded, and the public indignation, emphasised as it was by Victoria's growing popularity, was particularly great.

Either for this or for some other reason the procedure of the last forty years was abandoned, and Maclean was tried for high treason.

The result was what might have been expected: the jury brought in a verdict of "not guilty, but insane"; and the prisoner was sent to an asylum during Her Majesty's pleasure.

Their verdict, however, produced a remarkable consequence.

Victoria, who doubtless carried in her mind some memory of Albert's disapproval of a similar verdict in the case of Oxford, was very much annoyed.

What did the jury mean, she asked, by saying that Maclean was not guilty?

It was perfectly clear that he was guilty--she had seen him fire off the pistol herself.

It was in vain that Her Majesty's constitutional advisers reminded her of the principle of English law which lays down that no man can be found guilty of a crime unless he be proved to have had a criminal intention.

Victoria was quite unconvinced.

"If that is the law," she said, "the law must be altered:" and altered it was.

In 1883 an Act was passed changing the form of the verdict in cases of insanity, and the confusing anomaly remains upon the Statute Book to this day.

But it was not only through the feelings--commiserating or indignant--of personal sympathy that the Queen and her people were being drawn more nearly together; they were beginning, at last, to come to a close and permanent agreement upon the conduct of public affairs.

Mr. Gladstone's second administration (1880-85) was a succession of failures, ending in disaster and disgrace; liberalism fell into discredit with the country, and Victoria perceived with joy that her distrust of her Ministers was shared by an ever-increasing number of her subjects.

During the crisis in the Sudan, the popular temper was her own.

She had been among the first to urge the necessity of an expedition to Khartoum, and, when the news came of the catastrophic death of General Gordon, her voice led the chorus of denunciation which raved against the Government.

In her rage, she despatched a fulminating telegram to Mr. Gladstone, not in the usual cypher, but open; and her letter of condolence to Miss Gordon, in which she attacked her Ministers for breach of faith, was widely published.

It was rumoured that she had sent for Lord Hartington, the Secretary of State for War, and vehemently upbraided him.

"She rated me," he was reported to have told a friend, "as if I'd been a footman."

"Why didn't she send for the butler?"

asked his friend.

"Oh," was the reply, "the butler generally manages to keep out of the way on such occasions."

But the day came when it was impossible to keep out of the way any longer.

Mr. Gladstone was defeated, and resigned.

Victoria, at a final interview, received him with her usual amenity, but, besides the formalities demanded by the occasion, the only remark which she made to him of a personal nature was to the effect that she supposed Mr. Gladstone would now require some rest.

He remembered with regret how, at a similar audience in 1874, she had expressed her trust in him as a supporter of the throne; but he noted the change without surprise.

"Her mind and opinions," he wrote in his diary afterwards, "have since that day been seriously warped."

Such was Mr. Gladstone's view,; but the majority of the nation by no means agreed with him; and, in the General Election of 1886, they showed decisively that Victoria's politics were identical with theirs by casting forth the contrivers of Home Rule--that abomination of desolation--into outer darkness, and placing Lord Salisbury in power.

Victoria's satisfaction was profound.

A flood of new unwonted hopefulness swept over her, stimulating her vital spirits with a surprising force.

Her habit of life was suddenly altered; abandoning the long seclusion which Disraeli's persuasions had only momentarily interrupted, she threw herself vigorously into a multitude of public activities.

She appeared at drawing-rooms, at concerts, at reviews; she laid foundation-stones; she went to Liverpool to open an international exhibition, driving through the streets in her open carriage in heavy rain amid vast applauding crowds.

Delighted by the welcome which met her everywhere, she warmed to her work.

She visited Edinburgh, where the ovation of Liverpool was repeated and surpassed.

In London, she opened in high state the Colonial and Indian Exhibition at South Kensington.

On this occasion the ceremonial was particularly magnificent; a blare of trumpets announced the approach of Her Majesty; the "Natiohal Anthem" followed; and the Queen, seated on a gorgeous throne of hammered gold, replied with her own lips to the address that was presented to her.

Then she rose, and, advancing upon the platform with regal port, acknowledged the acclamations of the great assembly by a succession of curtseys, of elaborate and commanding grace.

Next year was the fiftieth of her reign, and in June the splendid anniversary was celebrated in solemn pomp.

Victoria, surrounded by the highest dignitaries of her realm, escorted by a glittering galaxy of kings and princes, drove through the crowded enthusiasm of the capital to render thanks to God in Westminster Abbey.

In that triumphant hour the last remaining traces of past antipathies and past disagreements were altogether swept away.

The Queen was hailed at once as the mother of her people and as the embodied symbol of their imperial greatness;

and she responded to the double sentiment with all the ardour of her spirit.

England and the people of England, she knew it, she felt it, were, in some wonderful and yet quite simple manner, hers.

Exultation, affection, gratitude, a profound sense of obligation, an unbounded pride--such were her emotions; and, colouring and intensifying the rest, there was something else.

At last, after so long, happiness--fragmentary, perhaps, and charged with gravity, but true and unmistakable none the less--had returned to her.

The unaccustomed feeling filled and warmed her consciousness.

When, at Buckingham Palace again, the long ceremony over, she was asked how she was, "I am very tired, but very happy," she said.