ROYAL SECLUSION

“‘Nay, let my people see me!’ Kind Was she whom then our cheers were greeting, Now, would that Lady bear in mind That words like those will bear repeating?” _Shirley Brooks in ‘Punch.’_

“Prince Albert, the oppressively good.”--_Current Press._

After the death of Prince Albert, Queen Victoria practically buried herself; she did not put her body under the ground, it is true, but what was almost equally bad she enclosed her mind in stone, in mausoleums, statues, cairns and other _mori memento_, and to the living world she became as dead as a nun. To her family she still partly lived, and that family no doubt hoped to see her some day again fully alive, but they could scarcely have believed that two dozen years would pass before Victoria would begin to recognize the ordinary amenities of social life. Yet so it was, and this long self-indulgence in a life of privacy while clinging to the most public post in the kingdom, explains to a great extent why the nation generally feel a far deeper personal affection for Edward VII than for Queen Victoria. The fact that she was a woman saved the Queen from the full effect of her sins of omission. Men were imbued by that unhealthy sense of what is called chivalry for womanhood which allows of two standards of right and honour for the two sexes; the men of the time were also suspicious that they could not understand such an unreasonable creature as woman, and that it was better to accede to her whims than dispute them. “Men must work and women must weep” explained the whole situation, and that Queen Victoria did weep and nurse her grief continually seemed for a time sufficient excuse for the neglect of all her public work. But there is not the slightest doubt that had a king in the same circumstances indulged his personal wishes to the exclusion of public duty, as did Queen Victoria, that which was nearly a revolution in 1867 would have been completely so, for the discontent and anger of the people was by that time intense.

Another quality which helped to save the situation was the Queen’s sentimental nature, for it was an age of sentimentality, of feminine, or rather, to use the then current word, “female” foolishness and masculine superiority, an age when “females” tied their husband’s neckties and laced their boots, when the “male” thought he was justified in swearing at his wife if she neglected to put the studs into his shirt, and expected her to consider herself fully compensated by his protection.

The Queen was intensely sentimental. To the end of her days she wrote birthday greetings to every child, grandchild and great-grandchild, as well as to many others; she mourned all deaths on the right anniversaries, and remembered all the marriages. With such a nature it was understandable that she should assume perpetual mourning for the Prince Consort. At first her people responded by putting up statues to his memory, and nothing roused her so much as these evidences of sympathy. Each one was a justification for her continued mourning, and she commemorated the bereavement in every possible fashion. Thus early in her widowhood she summoned Noel Paton to Windsor to arrange the painting of a picture of “The Bereaved Family,” and later she broke through her new habit of seclusion sufficiently to go to the artist’s studio to see how the picture was progressing. Finding his little boy there, and always loving children, she is said to have asked him if he would not kiss her, to which he replied “No.” Being asked if he knew who she was, he answered--

“Yes, you are the Queen of England, and you killed Queen Mary, so I don’t love you.” An answer which probably did not displease her, as she, too, disliked Queen Elizabeth for the same cause.

Early in 1862 great exertions were being made to raise subscriptions for an Albert memorial in London, which were responded to but slowly; and to his memory the Royal Horticultural Gardens were inaugurated by the Prince of Wales. The Queen paid her first visit since her widowhood to the metropolis the following year to see them.

Her first care was the mausoleum at Frogmore, which was built as a cross with the funeral cell in the centre, that part being lit by windows in the clerestory. The roof was of copper, bearing a square tower surmounted by a cross. The doorway was guarded by monoliths of Aberdeen granite, and the whole exterior was faced with a mixture of granite from Aberdeen and Guernsey.

The Queen was never tired of adding to the interior adornments of this mourning house, I had almost said this place of worship, until in 1890 its effect was sumptuous rather than austere. A great picture of Christ emerging from the tomb, with Roman soldiers hiding under their shields in fear at the triumph over death, hung over the altar; on one side was a picture of the crucifixion, and on the other one of the visit of the disciples to the empty tomb. Four bronze angels supported the sarcophagus, upon which rested a recumbent figure of the Prince in white marble. A beautiful marble statue of Princess Alice later occupied a recess. Before the tomb were placed three rows of chairs, the first devoted to the Queen and her children, the second to lesser royalties and principal ladies, and the third to other ladies and gentlemen. Such was the spot which for a long time became the centre of the Queen’s death-in-life.

In the Highlands a cairn, its base forty feet square, was raised on Craig Lowrigan, where it could be seen “all down the valley.” “I and my poor six orphans all placed stones on it; and our initials as well as those of the three absent ones are to be carved on the stones all round it,” wrote Victoria. This cairn was the subject of a stupid sermon by a Dr. Candlish, a leading light among the Free Kirkers who took umbrage at the inscription, from _The Wisdom of Solomon_, “He being made perfect in a short time fulfilled a long time. For his soul pleased the Lord; therefore hastened He to take him away from among the wicked.”

The Free Kirkers, having justly desired to choose their own pastors, had years before rebelled against lay patronage, and had provoked the determined opposition of the Queen, who considered that the royal prerogative was in essence being assailed. Therefore they were ready to condemn all English ecclesiasticism, and Candlish declared that this text was a studied insult to the “Bible that Scotland loved,” to the doctrine of Inspiration, to Scotland and [which was certainly true] to the generation from which the Prince had been removed by death. It was “shabby, flimsy, a wretched shred and a sham without even an allusion to blessed immortality.”

The English were aghast at this attack on the Queen, and Candlish had to publish an apology, which was really almost as bad as the offence, as he declared that he did not for a moment think that the Queen had chosen such a text, but had been led away by the evil advice of English clergymen.

The Scot is a cute person, and a religious publisher seized this opportunity of pushing a new edition of the Bible which he had ready, with this flourish of advertising verbosity--

“A copy has been presented to the Prince of Wales and the Princess Alexandra through Lord Shaftesbury--who have been graciously pleased, especially the Princess, that brightest of orbs in the firmament of living beauty, to express high admiration of it.”

Truly religion in the beloved Highlands was on its trial!

It was in the autumn of 1863 and at Aberdeen that Victoria appeared for the first time in public, and then mutely, to unveil a statue to Albert, and to declare through the lips of Sir George Grey that she had come “to proclaim in public the unbounded reverence and admiration, the devoted love that fills my heart for him whose loss must throw a lasting gloom over all my future life.”

Such words in such circumstances would to-day seem greatly wanting in reticence and dignity, but upon this subject Victoria knew no reticence, and she followed this unveiling and declaration with many other events of the same kind both in Scotland and England.

In time “statues to the Prince almost covered the land,” as Gladstone once said, and even Ireland tried to do its best. But at Dublin the movement met a check. The Irish knew themselves neglected by rulers and governing classes, and the Irish remember even to this day a speech by Prince Albert in which he said contemptuously that the Irish were entitled to no more sympathy than were the Poles. The Fenian movement too, born in Paris about 1855 of Irish agitators, and nursed in America, had grown strong and lusty, so when the Mayor of Dublin called a meeting on February 8, 1863, to arrange to put up a Prince Albert statue on College Green, a man named Sullivan made a proposal that the statue of Grattan should occupy the spot, saying that Dublin people would hate the Prince’s statue and hiss it as they passed.

Sullivan’s motion was defeated, but he called a meeting of protest in the Rotunda, which was said to have been attended by 40,000 people. Now the protestor himself was regarded as a traitor by the majority of the Fenians, and when he began to speak the moiety of the audience which had got into the hall, among the leaders of whom was O’Donovan Rossa, went for him, and also for the O’Donoghue, M.P., who was chairman of the meeting. These two flew for their lives, hid for two hours in some private room and were rescued by the police. In the great hall the speaking had occupied only a few minutes, but for two hours a free fight raged, being probably much enjoyed by the combatants.

That was the end of the Prince’s statue on the Green, and years later one was erected there to Grattan, the work being done by J. H. Foley. A statue was eventually erected to Albert on Leinster Lawn, which forms one side of Merrion Square and belongs to the Royal Dublin Society. It was protected by high railings, yet one Sunday night in 1872 an attempt was made to blow it up with dynamite.

The impression left upon the mind of the Queen was that the Irish had flouted and insulted the memory of her adored husband, and it was over thirty-six years before she showed any signs of forgiving the incident.

In 1866 the Queen sent to her eldest grandchild, William of Prussia, a silver statuette of his grandfather, three feet high, representing him as a hero conquering sin.

There was probably a double reason for this, for the beloved first grandchild was showing an unamiable spirit. Sir Charles Hallé described him paradoxically as charming, but a devil. The little prince had entered the Queen’s room just as Sir Charles was leaving it, and Victoria told him to salute her visitor. He refused, and she asked him what his mamma would say if she were told that her little boy was impolite. However, he would not move. The Queen insisted that he should obey, and the delightful eight-year-old boy, looking straight into her eyes, said--

“I will not!”

This was followed by a spanking, or as the musician put it, “a veritable struggle and a very painful one took place between grandmother and grandson. At last the child yielded and made a deep bow.”

There is another story, probably belonging to a somewhat earlier year, of how little William, being naughty at the luncheon-table, was sentenced to disappear beneath the table until the meal was over. Being at last allowed to return to dining-room society, he emerged--stark naked.

The fact that Queen Victoria, while repudiating all public activity, found energy to visit Netley Hospital and the Consumptive Hospital at Brompton early in her widowhood, these being places the foundation stones of which had been laid by the Prince; that she instituted the Albert medal as an award to those who saved life at sea; that for years her chief personal interest was in planning and unveiling memorials; all these indicate the state of her mind. She had fallen in love with grief, and her only pleasure came from indulging it.

As the years passed the public grew tired of this insistence upon woe. It had wept with her at first and had been roused to a sympathetic, protective love for her. The journals had given the Prince such pæans of praise as a winding-sheet as were not later accorded to Victoria herself. This was a reaction of feeling in regard to the popular prejudice against the Prince which had troubled all his English life, and the reaction was caused by the suddenness of the catastrophe and a true appreciation of the Queen’s grief; but it passed, and the public’s opinion of the Prince Consort gradually veered round to what it had been, largely, at the time, because of the resentment felt at Victoria’s attitude in showing always that the dead man was of more importance to her than her living subjects.

But Queen Victoria thought that that evanescent mood had come to stay, and that her people’s first care should be that she should be left in peace with her sorrow. So for the first three or four years she saw no one but her children and usual attendants; she refused to go to London or to take up any Court functions--Albert had always hated London, and she too disliked it. She grew morbid and self-absorbed, and suffered keenly from self-consciousness on the very rare occasions when she did appear before strangers, generally to unveil a statue.

A ball or so, a concert or so, a drawing-room or so, each with a princess as hostess, made the courtly season, and the tradesmen of London began to complain, the papers began to urge the Queen to come into view, and the people began to say, “Why have a queen at all?” Victoria paid no heed, for she had a large share of that firmness which the vulgar call obstinacy. She also possessed an absolute conviction that when she had chosen a course she _could not_ be wrong, her decision, being hers, must be right. Therefore she refused all concessions and continued in her isolated position. She saw nothing of the change coming over the minds of men, of the republican feeling which was permeating the working classes under Palmerston’s contempt for all schemes of political reform, of the hatred which was leavening Ireland against England because of the mixed policy of neglect and tyranny which obtained there. She only saw, when complaints were made, that her people were unjust and cruel to her personally, that republicanism was a sin against Divine Right, and that the Irish were very wicked people. Such warnings as the following, published by _The Times_, she regarded as pure extravagance--

“It may be that in time London may accustom itself to do without the Palace, but it is not desirable that we should attain that point of republican simplicity.... No reigning house can afford to confirm in their view those who suggest that the throne is only an antiquarian relic and royalty itself a ceremony, who think that the less that is seen and heard of a Court the better.”

In 1864 she made the concession of allowing her birthday to be kept with the usual honours, she herself being at Balmoral. The next year she announced that she would hold two Courts, one for diplomatists and the second for such distinguished persons as she wished to invite. At once the hope arose that Buckingham Palace would again become inhabited and the Court recover from its state of suspended animation, but there was a tinge of doubt and bitterness mixed with the hope.

The first reception, that to the diplomatists, had an unfortunate introduction; the officials who arranged it had been four years out of practice, and had forgotten the formula. They sent out the invitations in something like this form--

“The Queen will graciously receive the Corps Diplomatique, _male_ and _female_, at a Court to be held at Buckingham Palace,” etc.

Such a barbarism could not pass unnoticed, and the invited gentlemen sent their cards to their respective Courts, either as curiosities or to ask for guidance, so the blunder was known all over the world. Victoria must have felt much mortified, and though all those responsible tried to shift the fault on to each other’s shoulders, nobody dared to suggest that it was want of usage which occasioned the stupidity.

Two swallows do not make a summer, and these two receptions did not constitute a season; the grumbles and entreaties continued, and in September 1865 _Punch_ published its renowned cartoon of “Hermione,” in which Pauline, in the form of Britannia, is shown drawing back some curtains, thus revealing a statue of the Queen, crowned and wearing her robes of State.

“‘Tis time! Descend! Be stone no more!” says Pauline.

At last, when public comment became too loud and sustained, Victoria published a definite statement of her intentions, declaring that the idea that she was intending to resume her place as head of society could not be too explicitly contradicted; that she had other and higher duties to perform, which weighed unceasingly upon her, overwhelming her with work and anxiety; that she had laboured to discharge those duties till her health and strength had been impaired. “To call upon her to undergo, in addition, the fatigue of those mere State ceremonies which can be equally well performed by other members of her family, is to ask her to run the risk of entirely disabling herself for the discharge of those other duties which cannot be neglected without serious injury to the public interest.” The statement ended with her saying that she would do what she could--in the manner least trying to her health, strength and spirits to give support to society and encouragement to trade.

This pronouncement rather increased than allayed the dissatisfaction, for the popular mind could not understand that any work should make a recluse of the most public official in the whole country. The difference between the two standpoints lay in the fact that England regards the Sovereign as the Crown of the State, while Victoria regarded herself not as the Crown alone but as the foundation, a somewhat contradictory view, which I doubt if even she could have explained.

What was this work in which she buried herself?

It was work which had gradually fallen into Albert-Victoria’s hands through the Germanic ideals of the Prince Consort, who, under Stockmar’s tuition, consistently mistook the functions of royalty in England. He demanded that nothing of any sort should be done in the Cabinet, or in Parliament, until it had received full consideration by the Queen; in actual fact he asked that the Constitution should become an absolute Monarchy, that no dispatches should be sent away until they had been studied by the Queen, which really meant by himself--and altered in agreement with her wishes. This applied not only to important matters but to everything, to the merest triviality of legislation; but foreign diplomacy was regarded as particularly the prerogative of the Sovereign--with a view to upholding Monarchy in Europe.

When the Prince died Victoria gathered all this work into her own hands, and at the same time felt acutely that it was no fit work for a woman, for she had no belief in the intellectual capacity of her sex. Thus, while she set herself to perform a perfectly unnecessary, useless and impossible task, she pitied herself with an intensity which was pathetic. Writing to Theodore Martin, she asked him to contradict the idea that it was the Queen’s sorrow which kept her secluded. “It is her _overwhelming_ work and her health which is greatly shaken by her sorrow, and the

After a painting by Winterhalter]

totally overwhelming amount of work and responsibility--work which she feels really wears her out. Alice Helps is wonder-struck at the Queen’s room, and if Mrs. Martin will look at it she can tell Mr. Martin what surrounds her. From the hour she gets out of bed until she gets into it again there is work, work, work, letter-boxes, questions, etc., which are dreadfully exhausting--and if she had not comparative rest and quiet in the evening she would most likely not be alive. Her brain is constantly overtaxed.”

Mrs. Martin went to look at the royal workroom, and wrote of “the piles of dispatch-boxes, all of them full of work for her, and all requiring immediate attention; and this goes on from day to day. It is the Queen’s great aim to follow the Prince’s plan, which was to _sign nothing_ until he had read and made notes upon what he signed. You may imagine how such conscientiousness swallows up the royal leisure.”

Conscientiousness is admirable, when rightly used; in this case, however, though it justified itself to the Queen, it was exercised to the detriment of the country. Upon all these papers dealing with the government of the country the most expert political brains of whichever party was in power had been exercised, yet each question had, in every stage of its development, to be reduced to the comprehension of a single mind, and every movement of its passage had to be retarded while that mind was not only grappling with it, but demanding alterations. Had Victoria’s intellect been equal to that of her most renowned Minister the situation would still have been difficult; as it was it was often painful, leading to an intense royal dislike of some statesmen, and a system of unashamed flattery on the part of others which, while oiling the wheels of the machine, was unperceived by Victoria.

It does seem as if the poor Queen, in her desire to continue to rule England according to the ideals of the Prince Consort and Stockmar, had set herself an overwhelming task, to use her own word. But there was, entirely unknown to her general subjects, and for a long time to her Cabinet, an alleviation of the situation. From the beginning of her widowhood she had called upon some of those who held official posts in her household to help her in these political duties. The Hon. Charles Grey, who had been private secretary to Albert, remained the Queen’s private secretary until his death in 1870. He and Sir Charles Phipps, the Keeper of the Privy Purse, were deputed by her to assist her personally in the matter of dispatches, and they had clerkly assistants to aid them. Mr., afterwards Sir Arthur, Helps, Clerk to the Privy Council, advised her in personal matters, and thus there were a number of people engaged in doing the actual work of which Victoria complained. An anonymous criticism of the Queen appeared in _The Quarterly Review_ in April 1891, the authorship of which I have seen ascribed to such diverse people as Baron Stockmar’s son and Lady Ponsonby--the first obviously impossible--which revealed much about this secret staff.

“The staff, never officially acknowledged in the fulness of its functions, had to exercise the most complete self-effacement and became in effect an expansion of the Queen’s personal power in action. The watchword of the lives of her private secretaries was devotion to the will of the Queen. The secret of the power they exercised was faithfully kept from the public, and will always be kept. These men gave their lives to her service, without demur or reserve, and it is as much to her honour as it is to theirs, that she inspired such complete devotion in men of such remarkable gifts.”

Later General Ponsonby, Sir Thomas Biddulph, Sir Arthur Bigge and Sir Fleetwood Edwards became members of the advising staff. These men were required to belong to no party, to have no politics and to show in their political work no bias, and they loyally succeeded in conforming to these conditions. Beaconsfield once said he believed General Ponsonby to be a Whig, but could not tell what he really was, adding, “I can only say that I could not wish my case stated to the Queen better than her private secretary does it.” Gladstone also paid the General a high tribute of the same kind.

These men, forming a sort of secret cabinet, read through all dispatches and digested all political questions, kept watch upon all matters of public importance, and had the history and analysis of events ready scheduled for Victoria’s use should she call for it. Thus her position was not so bad as she in her self-commiseration thought it was, and she found plenty of time to write her numberless family letters, keep in touch with a hundred and one schemes for perpetuating the Prince’s memory, and carry on various literary labours of her own.

The first of the books which she caused to be published--in 1862--was a collection of her husband’s speeches, Arthur Helps doing the actual preparation under her keen supervision. Then came the compilation of the volume entitled _Early Years of H.R.H. the Prince Consort_, in which Charles Grey helped her, the Queen sorting and choosing all the material. This work proved so congenial to her that she looked for more, and projected an important biography of the Prince. As Sir Charles Grey found it impossible again to combine his heavy secretarial duties with biographical work, she went for advice to Arthur Helps, a man of high literary attainment. He also being much occupied, suggested Theodore Martin as a likely man for the task, and under that gentleman’s editorship the five huge volumes of the _Life_ were written. Theodore Martin refused to take a penny for his work, doing it entirely as a labour of love, thereby receiving the friendship of the Queen and a knighthood. For this book Victoria chose all letters and documents and watched every page of its progress, allowing it to absorb much of her time. The first volume was not published until 1874, but the other four volumes followed quickly.

A fourth book, and in one way the most important of all, for it was much more widely read, and has long outlasted the others, was _Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands_, being a selection from Victoria’s diary written in her Balmoral home. The contents of this were carefully chosen by her Majesty, and Arthur Helps put it together. It is, or was in the last generation, too well known to need description; simply written, it is an account of daily life and excursions in Scotland, tremendously laudatory both of the scenery and the people, precise as to the hour and minute at which everything was done, and full of allusions to the Prince: “Albert was in perfect ecstacies ... it delighted dear Albert ... Albert enjoyed it so much.” Also as _Punch_--and other reviews--wickedly said, “the trait that seems to be the most prominent in her Majesty’s book is the tea-tray.” One paper solemnly declared that it was untrue that Sir Wilfred Lawson intended to write a diary of his temperance work and dedicate it to the Queen under the title “More (Tea) Leaves.” The Royal party seems to have been a perpetual tea-party, for wherever they went or whatever happened the tea-kettle was always being boiled. At Balmoral it appears to have been all holiday, for work is never mentioned in the book, which was one that any simple-minded woman might have written, making no pretensions to style; but then, said Victoria, “How could Mr. Helps expect pains to be taken when she wrote late at night, suffering from headache and exhaustion, and in dreadful haste and not for publication?”

However, it was published, privately in 1867 and publicly the next year, realizing something over £30,000, which some paragraphist gravely asserted was given to the Prince of Wales, who on an inadequate income was doing all the royal State work. Thus it will be seen that while the Queen was lamenting that her work for her country destroyed her health, she was also deeply engrossed in superintending four books, three of which appeared at the very time that she was excusing herself from her public duties.