An Audience with Queen Victoria E-Book

Ian Lloyd

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 449

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

One of Britain's most famous and longest serving rulers, Queen Victoria saw widespread change across her empire. During her sixty-three-year reign, in which she became one of the most powerful and influential people in the world, Victoria met everyone from Florence Nightingale to 'Buffalo Bill', as well as royalty from around the world with whom she exchanged truly unique gifts. After meeting the exalted monarch her subjects often recorded their impressions of her, sometimes favourable and sometimes not, and she wasn't shy with her opinion either. The records range from her less than enamoured assessment of 'Greatest Showman' P.T. Barnum and her opinions about Jack the Ripper, to how much she enjoyed Jane Eyre and the affection she held for her family. An Audience with Queen Victoria examines the meetings and letters exchanged between the Queen and a veritable 'who's who' of her time. Through brand-new archival research, newspapers and interviews with descendants, sit right alongside Victoria and, for the first time, experience queenship from her perspective.

Leseprobe

Queen Victoria. (Library of Congress)

TO JULIE AND DAVID HARSANT,TRUE FRIENDS, WITH LOVE

First published 2019

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Ian Lloyd, 2019

The right of Ian Lloyd to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN978 0 7509 9119 3

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

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eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Preface

1Out of Africa:Exchanging Gifts with Kings and Chieftains

2Two Degrees of Separation – Victoria and Rita Hayworth:The Queen Meets the Aga Khan

3‘I Have Seen the World’:An Abyssinian Prince Captures Victoria’s Heart

4‘This Is Me!’:Barnum, the Greatest Showman, Fails to Impress the Queen

5Getting Connected:Victoria is Taught How to Use the Telephone by Alexander Graham Bell

6French Leave:Queen Victoria Meets Sarah Bernhardt

7Whip-Crack-Away:Queen Victoria and the Wild West Show

8‘Stout … Plain … Not Much Dignity’:Charlotte Brontë Glimpses the Queen

9‘A Very Modest Young Man’:Pablo Casals Plays for Victoria

10Pitch Perfect:Ivor Novello’s Mother and Four Welsh Choirs in Five Years

11A Dickens of a Crush:Queen Victoria and Charles Dickens

12Thoroughly in Tune:Edvard Grieg Plays for Victoria

13‘These Horrible Crimes’:Victoria and ‘Jack the Ripper’

14The Churchills:Winston Churchill’s Mother and Father Impress the Queen

15Animal Magnetism:Queen Victoria and Landseer

16‘So Terrible a Calamity’:Victoria Mourns Abraham Lincoln

17Lisztomania:Queen Victoria and Franz Liszt

18‘My Singing Teacher’:Queen Victoria and Mendelssohn

19Darling Grandmama:Queen Victoria, Nicholas and Alexandra

20‘We Are Much Pleased With Her’:Florence Nightingale Impresses the Queen

21Lamb on a Persian Rug:Queen Victoria Receives the Shah

22Tragedy at Mayerling:How the Suicide of the Austrian Heir Affected the Queen

23One Could Have Danced All Night:Victoria Waltzes to Johann Strauss

24‘Nearer My God to Thee’:The Queen, Gilbert and Sullivan

25Three Degrees of Separation – Queen Victoria and Oliver Reed:Meeting Sir Henry Beerbohm Tree

26Hitting the Right Note:Queen Victoria and Richard Wagner

27The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name:Oscar Wilde’s Fascination with Queen Victoria

28I was Kaiser Bill’s Grandma:Queen Victoria and Kaiser Wilhelm II

Bibliography

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A book that examines Queen Victoria’s thoughts and opinions of her contemporaries would be nothing without access to her voluminous collection archive of written material.

I am therefore indebted to Her Majesty the Queen, the copyright holder, for her kind permission to quote from her great-great-grandmother’s journals in the Royal Archives.

I would also like to thank the following individuals and also the representatives of organisations associated with the thirty iconic figures whose relationship with Queen Victoria is discussed in the book:

Angela Bamford (Linguist and Translator)

James Cornelius (Secretary of the Abraham Lincoln Association and Curator of the Lincoln Collection at the Lincoln Presidential Library)

Bruce Eldredge and Karen Roles (The Buffalo Bill Center of the West)

Steve Friesen (Director, Buffalo Bill Museum)

Merlin Holland (grandson of Oscar Wilde)

Robert Lacey (Royal Historian)

Helen MacEwan (The Brussels Brontë Group)

Christine McMorris (Commissioning Editor of The History Press)

Pamela Morton (NUJ Freelance Organiser)

Hugh Bell Muller (great-grandson of Alexander Graham Bell)

Michael Short, of the Liszt Society, UK, for answering detailed questions and for allowing me to quote from his forthcoming biography of the composer

Sarah Whale (Assistant Curator to the Marquess of Salisbury, Hatfield House)

Brian Wood (Curator, The Bell Homestead, Brantford, Ontario)

I am deeply grateful to Christine McMorris, Alex Waite and Jessicca Gofton for commissioning, producing and marketing this book for The History Press and finally I am deeply indebted to the friendly, hard-working staff of Cowley Library, Oxford, for dealing with my constant stream of enquiries and orders.

PREFACE

During her long life Queen Victoria met everyone from the opera singer Luigi Lablache, who was a pall-bearer at Beethoven’s funeral, to the cellist Pablo Casals, who lived long enough to play for JFK at the White House. An Audience with Queen Victoria examines the contact between the Queen and is a veritable ‘Who’s Who’ of her times. It draws on the honest character assessments in her journals and letters of those she met – for example, Alexander Graham Bell she thought ‘pompous’ while she found the composer Wagner ‘short, very quiet, wears spectacles and has a very finely-developed forehead, a hooked nose & projecting chin’. Not all the meetings are up close and personal. Charlotte Brontë stood in the packed streets of Brussels to see the Queen drive past, though she did have enough time to see that her monarch was ‘stout’, ‘vivacious’ and ‘plainly dressed’. Oscar Wilde claims to have been entranced by her sashaying walk at a garden party.

While those who did meet her face to face treated her with near reverence, once safely back on non-royal territory they could be entertainingly cheeky in their accounts to their nearest and dearest. Bell told his wife that the Queen was ‘humpy, stumpy, dumpy’ while the future Nicholas II of Russia referred to ‘darling grandmama’ as ‘a round ball on unsteady legs’ and even ‘belly woman’ in blokish letters to his brother George.

I have made an admittedly self-indulgent choice of famous Victorians whose lives one way or another came within the Queen’s orbit, selecting those with amusing or rare anecdotes. In doing so I have omitted the well-documented accounts of those she knew best, such as members of her family, with the exception of two of her most charismatic grand-children, as well as her friends, household and politicians.

Although the majority of chapters deal with the Queen’s relationship with one of her contemporaries, two of the chapters deal with a married couple: first, Winston Churchill’s parents Lord and Lady Randolph Churchill, and second Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and his wife Tsarina Alexandra, the Queen’s favourite granddaughter.

I have also aimed to veer off-course now and then to bring in unusual aspects of the Queen’s personality, such as her interest in modern technology. She was one of the very first in this country to try out (and later buy) a telephone. She recorded her voice on a phonograph as a present for an African king and was filmed in ‘moving pictures’ by Downey.

Above all I’ve aimed to search for lesser-known anecdotes, such as her account of seeing a polo match – ‘a very fast game, something like Hockey on horsback [sic]’ – and her dutiful sending of a gift of one of her widow’s caps with streamers attached to an African chief, who wore it reverentially under his top hat. Added together they will hopefully give an insight into the Queen’s multi-faceted personality, which continues to intrigue and entrance 200 years after her birth.

Ian LloydOxfordJanuary 2019

1

OUT OF AFRICA

EXCHANGING GIFTS WITH KINGS AND CHIEFTAINS

Menelik II.

BRITISH MONARCHS have exchanged gifts with foreign leaders from the earliest times. Henry VIII and Francis I of France gave each other jousting horses at the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520, and the Ottoman ruler Suleiman I gave Henry two pet monkeys, which he took with him to meet the French king.

After the death of the Prince Consort in 1861, Victoria no longer travelled abroad on state visits and never visited any part of her growing empire. She did, however, receive visits from heads of state and delegations from her Indian and African territories. The presents they exchanged were often personal, and occasionally bizarre.

In her memoirs, Princess Marie Louise tells of a meeting between her grandmother and a chieftain from the Gold Coast, now Ghana. The be-robed visitor was the exotically titled holder of the ‘stool’ of Agbosome. After his audience at Windsor, the Queen asked if there was anything she could give him as a souvenir of their meeting. Pointing to the white ‘lisse’ widow’s cap with its long streamers that she always wore in private, he replied, ‘Yes, Mighty Queen: I should like to have a bonnet as Your Majesty is now wearing, and I would like to be the only chief entitled to wear it. I will pass it on to my successors.’

Both were true to their word. Victoria asked for a cap to present to the Chief and he and his successors wore it as proof of sovereignty. However, another local custom was for the leader to wear a top hat too. Years later Marie Louise was sent a photograph of the Chief in full regalia, with her grandmother’s cap on his head surmounted by a top hat. As she herself commented, ‘the effect is quaint to say the least!’1

Another visitor, a Chief of the Axim district (which again is in modern-day Ghana), was received by the Queen, who was accompanied by several uniformed courtiers. When asked what memento he would like he is supposed to have said, ‘Your Majesty, I should like to have a medal bigger than any I see now,’ and so Victoria obligingly had a specially large one struck just for him.2

The Queen and her government had a fraught relationship with Emperor Tewodros II of Abyssinia (now Ethiopia), later dubbed ‘Mad King Theodore’, the Ethiopian version of Russia’s Ivan the Terrible. In 1863 he wrote to Victoria asking for skilled workers to come to Abyssinia to produce firearms and other skills. Unfortunately, the Foreign Office in London filed it under ‘Pending’ for a year before forwarding it to India, since Abyssinian affairs came under the remit of the sub-continent. Here it was filed under ‘Not Even Pending’. The temperamentally volatile Tewodros, incensed at this snub by the Queen and her government, imprisoned the British Consul, Charles Cameron, as well as all the British subjects based in his country.

Eventually, after a three-year hiatus, the British sent a mission under the Abyssinian-born Hormuzd Rassam. The latter carried the much anticipated letter from ‘your good friend Victoria R’ written at Balmoral on her birthday, 24 May 1864. It offered Tewodros ‘friendship’ but denied him an embassy, ignored the request for help with arms, and asked for the release of ‘Our servant’ Cameron and the other British citizens.

This upset Tewodros even more and in retaliation he imprisoned Rassam and his mission with the other British and European prisoners, while he negotiated with the Queen. Writing to ‘Victoria, who God has elected and exalted above all men’, he once again asked for ‘skilful artists … workmen’ to help him establish a gun industry. ‘Rejoicing in their coming,’ he promised, ‘I shall receive them with great honour, and give them good pay.’ He included a list of equipment from a small blast steam engine to a gunpowder mill (with rollers).3 The Emperor then released Martin Flad, a lay missionary with the London Jewish Society, whom he’d imprisoned with his wife and family, and tasked him to return to Britain with the letter.

The Queen received the missionary and her own Prime Minister at Osborne on 14 August 1866:

Saw Ld Stanley* & a MrFladd [sic], a German Missionary, who was with those unhappy captives, confined by king Theodore of Abyssinia then released, & finally taken again. It is thought that my having seen MrFladd & asked him to tell the king that he must let these poor people go, may have a good effect. He is to say, that unless this is done, there can be no friendship between us.4

As the full story of Rassam’s trial and imprisonment filtered through, all thoughts of a compromise involving the Queen were wiped out, and instead the government decided to send an expeditionary force under Sir Robert Napier. He defeated 9,000 troops loyal to Tewodros at the Battle of Magdala on 9 April 1868 with only two British casualties. The prisoners were released, but instead of negotiating, Napier went on to capture Magdala. Before this last ditch battle, Tewodros made it clear he would never allow himself to be taken prisoner by the enemy. As his remaining troops were slaughtered and his citadel was stormed by Napier’s men, the Emperor seized a favourite duelling pistol, placed the barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger. When the redcoats found the body minutes later, they noted the sunlight reflecting on a silver plate on the stock. The inscription read:

PRESENTEDBYVICTORIAQueen OF GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELANDTOTHEODORUSEMPEROR OF ABYSSINIAAS A SLIGHT TOKEN OF HER GRATITUDEFOR HIS KINDNESS TO HER SERVANT PLOWDEN18545

Although the Queen never met Emperor Tewodros face to face, she was visited by several African leaders and delegations during the latter part of her reign. In her journal for May 1880 she records, with evident fascination, a meeting with Ugandan diplomats at Windsor:

Received the 3 black Envoys, from Central Africa, sent by the King of Uganda, who has been very friendly to the explorers & to Capt: Speke. They are very fine tall, dignified, youngish men, wearing a sort of loose blue coat & loose trowsers [sic] to the knee, with stockings & shoes, white shirts, & broad red sashes. Interpretors & Missionaries came with them.6

The most fascinating gift bestowed by the Queen was one that, sadly, never survived her lifetime. In her Diamond Jubilee year, 1897, Victoria received ‘some presents from the Empress of Abyssinia, 2 necklaces, &c, one of them said to be exactly like that worn by the Queen of Sheba, from whom the Emperor Menelik claims to be descended’.7

The following year Menelik II – the third ruler of Abyssinia following the death of Tewodros II – asked if the Queen would record a message for him so he could hear her voice. ‘After luncheon,’ she noted in August 1898, ‘Ld Denbigh brought a phonograph into which I spoke, as it was wished I should sent [sic] a message to the Emperor Menelik. It will be sealed up & destroyed, after he has received the message.’

Victoria’s insistence that it should be destroyed may have been to stop it falling into non-royal hands after it was sent abroad. Another reason is embodied in a minute sent by Sir Thomas Sanderson, Permanent Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office, to the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury. According to the former, ‘the voice produced by a phonograph is rather nasal and squawky – a travesty of the original.’ We have no transcript of Victoria’s message, though a minute from Lord Salisbury to Sanderson observes, ‘I think your formula will do admirably. If HM desires to add sentiment or admonition, she will do it better than we can.’

A delighted Menelik and his wife listened to the message with due ceremony. An artillery salute was fired and the royal couple stood in respect as it was played several times. The wax cylinder was then smashed to pieces as per the Queen’s wishes. The Emperor and Empress recorded their own message, which was brought to Victoria at Osborne. She listened to it and read the translation, making the observation, ‘it was very curious’.

There was one final gift from Africa in the summer of 1900. ‘I saw the Zebra given me by King Menelik of Abyssinia, which has only now been brought down to the Shaw Farm from the Zoological Gardens,’ the Queen noted at Windsor Castle on 13 July. ‘It is a beautiful beast, very large, & wonderfully marked. Unfortunately the other one, which came at the same time, died.’8

Notes

1Marie Louise, Princess: My Memories of Six Reigns: Penguin: 1956: pp.118–19

2Ibid.: p.119

3Marsden, Philip: The Barefoot Emperor: HarperCollins: 2007: pp.170–2

4RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ (W) Tuesday 14 August 1866 (Princess Beatrice’s copies). Retrieved 9 January 2018

5Stanley, H.M.: Coomassie and Magdala: Sampson Low: 1874: p.251

6RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ (W) Friday 14 May 1880 (Princess Beatrice’s copies). Retrieved 9 January 2018

7RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ (W) Tuesday 16 February 1897 (Princess Beatrice’s copies). Retrieved 9 January 2018

8RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ (W) Friday 13 July 1897 (Princess Beatrice’s copies). Retrieved 9 January 2018

*Edward Smith-Stanley, 14th Earl of Derby, Prime Minister 1866–68.

2

TWO DEGREES OF SEPARATION – VICTORIA AND RITA HAYWORTH

THE QUEEN MEETS THE AGA KHAN

Aga Khan III.

SULTAN SIR Mohammed Shah, known as Aga Khan III (1877–1957), succeeded his father Aga Khan II as imam (leader) of the Nizari Ismaili sect in 1885. He is most remembered today as a successful horse breeder and racehorse owner and for briefly being the father-in-law of the Hollywood actress Rita Hayworth.

In a 1954 television interview to promote his newly published memoirs, the Aga Khan remarked that the most notable person whom he had ever known was Queen Victoria. He would go on to be close to Victoria’s five successors as monarch, and noted in 1954:

When I was a young man I sat next to Queen Victoria at a dinner party and talked to her throughout it; the other day I sat next to Queen Elizabeth II at a tea party and talked to her throughout it.1

The Sultan’s first encounter with the British Royal Family was with Victoria’s third son, the Duke of Connaught. Named Arthur after his godfather the Duke of Wellington, he also served in the army and saw military service in South Africa, Canada, Ireland, Egypt and India. It was during his time in the subcontinent as Commander-in-Chief of the British Army from December 1886 to March 1890 that their paths crossed when the Aga Khan was only 9 years old. The boy ruler was a frequent guest of the Duke and his wife, the former Princess Louise Margaret of Prussia, who spoiled him with ‘more toffee and chocolate than was altogether good for me’. He would also encounter the Duke riding each day, when Prince Arthur would always stop and talk to him. When he finally met the Empress of India at Windsor, ‘she said at once, I remember, that she had heard all about me and my home from her son’.2

In 1898 the Aga Khan toured Europe and was twice received by the Queen at Windsor Castle, where, during the second visit, she personally invested him with the KCIE (Knight Commander of the Indian Empire). By then he had already glimpsed the Queen during her annual spring stay in the south of France. He stayed in the same hotel as Victoria in Cimiez and recalled, ‘I had frequent opportunities of watching her go out to and return from her daily drives in her landau. She was helped in and out of her carriage by Indian servants from her personal household.’ The Aga Khan condescendingly pointed out that the monarch’s two Indian servants were ‘distinctly second-class servants, of the kind that you find around hotels and restaurants’, something he found ‘highly odd’; and he mused that perhaps the pay was not high enough to attract men of a higher calibre.3 Victoria’s family and the Royal Household would have concurred with this viewpoint. The Queen, on the other hand, was neither racist nor class conscious, and her romantic view of India, its people and in particular her beloved manservant Abdul Karim overcame the many rumblings of discontent from those closest to her about her fondness for the low-born men.

On 6 May 1898 the 20-year-old Aga Khan finally had the opportunity to talk to the Queen when he was summoned to see her at Windsor. The Queen noted in her journal:

After luncheon received, in the Audience Room, the Aga Khan, a young man, head of a big Mohamedan sect, called Khoja. He lives in India, but is really a Persian. He was dressed in a loose sort of Cashmere dressing gown, with a low turban on his head. He asked to kiss my hand, & was very shy, but speaks English quite well.4

In his memoirs the Aga Khan recalls the second meeting with the Queen when she invested him with the KCIE:

The Queen, enfolded in voluminous black wraps and shawls, was seated on a big sofa. Was she tall or short, was she stout or not? I could not tell; her posture and her wraps made assessments of that kind quite impossible. I kissed the hand which she held out to me. She remarked that the Duke of Connaught was a close friend of my family and myself. She had an odd accent, a mixture of Scotch and German – the German was perfectly explicable by the fact that she was brought up in the company of her mother, a German princess, and a German governess, Baroness Lehzen. She also had the German conversational trick of interjecting ‘so’ – pronounced ‘tzo’ – frequently into her remarks.5

The Queen told him that, as he was a prince, she would not ask him to kneel and be dubbed by a sword in the conventional method of knighting but would instead hand him the insignia as an equal – a courtesy he found very touching.

He was asked to stay to dinner where he:

sat at dinner between the Queen and her daughter Princess Beatrice.* The Queen was wearing her customary black – that mourning which, from the day after her husband died, she never put off. On her wrist she wore a large diamond bracelet set in the center of which was a beautiful miniature of the Prince Consort, about three inches long and two inches wide. The Queen was then seventy-nine; the vigor of her bearing and the facility and clarity of her conversation were astonishing.

The guests included the Lord Chancellor, the Earl of Halsbury, a small, squat, unimpressive-looking man. The Sultan remembered, ‘I was both surprised and amused when the Queen murmured to me that Lord Halsbury, though not much to look at, was a formidable lawyer and statesman.’

They talked of India and the Queen was very concerned to find out if her senior officials and representatives in the subcontinent were ‘civil or were they wanting in manners toward Indian Princes and gentry?’ The Aga Khan assured her they all showed him ‘impeccable kindness and courtesy’. Ironically there was nothing impeccable about his own kindness and courtesy to Victoria’s Indian attendants, ‘who were the same kind of rather second-rate servants whom I had noticed in her entourage at Nice’.6

The royal visitor has left us a valuable insight into the Queen’s eating habits, and her rather good appetite even in her last few years:

The dinner was long and elaborate – course after course, three or four choices of meat, a hot pudding and an iced pudding, a savory and all kinds of hothouse fruit – slow and stately in its serving. We sat down at a quarter past nine, and it must have been a quarter of eleven before it was all over. The Queen, in spite of her age, ate and drank heartily – every kind of wine that was offered and every course, including both the hot and the iced pudding.

Not everyone was impressed with Victoria’s overindulgence. Her personal physician, Dr James Reid, tried to wean her on to Benger’s Food, a wheat and milk food supplement designed to soothe the digestive system. Frustratingly for him she treated it as a food supplement and drank a nightly cup after gorging herself on her normal three-course late-night banquet.

After dinner she gave the Aga Khan a jewelled portrait of herself, decorated with the rose of England, the thistle of Scotland and the harp of Ireland – the latter in emeralds. More importantly to the equine-loving leader, she arranged for him to have a Royal Household badge for the Royal Ascot meeting – something that was re-bestowed on him in turn by Edward VII, George V, George VI and Elizabeth II.

Victoria’s account of the investiture and dinner shows she was charmed by her young visitor:

Invested the Aga Khan with the K.C. of the Indian Empire. He kissed my hand twice, pressing it to his forehead, & when saw him afterwards presented me with a most beautiful Tiara in pearls & diamonds, which can also be worn as a necklace … Dined in the large Dining Room … The Aga Khan sat next to me & is extremely intelligent & well informed, speaking beautiful English, which he learnt from his earliest youth. He was full of expressions of devotion to me & my family.7

The next morning Abdul Karim, known as ‘the Munshi’ or teacher by Victoria, was sent by the Queen to show the Aga Khan some of the texts she had copied in Urdu and Arabic characters. This time the Sultan made no scathing comments about the low-born Indian servant and instead opted to focus on Victoria’s genuine concern that those who represented her in this part of the empire did so with sensitivity to local people and traditions:

I particularly remember that at dinner she said to me with great earnestness she hoped that when British people in India visited mosques and temples, they conducted themselves with respect and reverence as they would in cathedrals in their own land.8

During his 1898 visit to Britain the Aga Khan attended two state concerts hosted at Buckingham Palace by the Prince of Wales* on behalf of the Queen. Edward acted benevolently to the younger man and enrolled him as a member of his own London club, the Marlborough Club. The Aga Khan was present at both Edward’s coronation in 1902 and his funeral in 1910. Afterwards he became a close friend to Edward’s successor George V and his consort Queen Mary, who were his near contemporaries, and he regularly dined with them whenever he was in Britain.

The Sultan attended the lavishly produced Delhi Durbar (Court of Delhi) of 1911 attended by George V and Queen Mary to mark their accession as Emperor and Empress of India. He later recalled two disastrous evenings during the festivities. First:

At the great state banquet, to which most of the notables of India had been invited, some disaster occurred in the kitchen, and the food that emerged was just enough to give the King and a handful of people sitting near him a full meal. For almost all of the guests it was the only chance in their lives that they would ever have of dining in the King’s company, but most of them had no dinner.

Then a few days later George held an investiture, during which he made the Aga Khan a Knight Grand Commander of the Star of India. The event was held in a tent, brilliantly lit by electric bulbs, one of which near the canvas roof started to flicker and threatened to explode:

Whistles were blowing, we could hear fire engines clanking up; behind their Majesties’ thrones officers had already drawn their swords and were hacking at the hangings and the canvas to make a way out for the King and Queen. But the rest of us were trapped.

In the event both the King and the bulb remained intact.9

The Aga Khan had first met the future Edward VIII when the latter was a sailor-suited boy of 4 at St James’s Palace. During Edward’s ten-month reign in 1936 the two men met at several private parties where the Sultan was struck by Wallis Simpson’s attempts to fit in with the besotted monarch’s circle of friends: ‘I found her as intelligent as she was charming, admirably well informed, devoid too of flippancy, and seriously and conscientiously striving to adjust her outlook to the King’s.’ He was also aware of the devastating effect the abdication crisis had on Edward’s family, and in particular his mother, Queen Mary: ‘Later in the year, in July I think, a great friend of Queen Mary’s told me that every day she wept bitterly when she thought of this hidden, unspoken catastrophe which loomed for her dearly loved son.’10

The Aga Khan frequently visited George VI and, in his old age, was occasionally received by Elizabeth II. In July 1952, five months after her accession, the 26-year-old Queen watched the Aga Khan’s horse Tulyar win the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes at Ascot and afterwards she invited the Sultan to meet her in the royal box. The following year she invited him and Prince Mohammed Ali to tea during her Coronation year. Mohammed Ali had for a short time been Regent of Egypt during the minority of King Farouk. Like the Aga Khan he had dined with Queen Victoria at Windsor in 1898, was also a fan of racing and bred Arabian horses. Fifty-five years after her great-great-grandmother entertained these two men, Elizabeth II, whose knowledge of horse breeding and bloodlines would become encyclopaedic, must have relished her chat with two of the legendary names of horse racing.

Notes

1Aga Khan, His Highness the: Memoirs of the Aga Khan – World Enough and Time: Simon and Schuster: 1954: Chapter 1

2Ibid.: Chapter 3

3Ibid.: Chapter 4

4RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ (W) Friday 6 May 1898 (Princess Beatrice’s copies). Retrieved 23 April 2018

5Aga Khan: Op. Cit.: Chapter 4

6Ibid.: Chapter 4

7RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ (W) Wednesday 13 July 1898 (Princess Beatrice’s copies). Retrieved 23 April 2018

8Aga Khan: Op. Cit.: Chapter 4

9Ibid.: Chapter 9

10Ibid.: Chapter 12

*Princess Henry of Battenberg (1857–1944), mother of Queen Ena of Spain.

*Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII.

3

‘I HAVE SEEN THE WORLD’

AN ABYSSINIAN PRINCE CAPTURES VICTORIA’S HEART

Captain Speedy with Alamayou.

ON THURSDAY 16 July 1868 Queen Victoria was in residence at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. Unable to cope with the blistering heat, the Queen spent most of the day resting indoors before emerging for tea in the garden with her daughters Alice and Helena. The three stayed outdoors painting in the Italianate garden until 8 p.m., when word reached them that the young son of the Emperor of Abyssinia, whom they’d been expecting since yesterday, had arrived.

As she emerged on to Osborne’s Lower Terrace the Queen came face to face with a bearded giant of a man and a frail, sad-looking child in Abyssinian robes. ‘Little Alamayou is a very pretty, slight graceful boy of 7,’ Victoria noted, ‘with beautiful eyes & a nice nose & mouth, though the lips are slightly thick. His skin is a dark bronze. His hair, which has been shaved, is crisp & curly.’

This, of course, was a royal child, and Victoria treated him as she would one of her own:

I kissed him, which he returned. He can say one or 2 words in English. Capt: Speedy, who has brought him, says the poor boy will never leave him for a moment, & always sleeps near him. They are an extraordinary contrast, Capt: Speedy being 6 ft: 6! & having red hair.1

Alamayou (‘I have seen the world’) was the son of Emperor Tewodros (or Theodore) of Abyssinia (modern-day Ethiopia). After the latter’s suicide in 1868 the explorer and adventurer Tristram Speedy, who was in the country to assist the British expeditionary force under Sir Robert Napier, was given the task of escorting the Prince to England. Shortly after departing, Alamayou’s mother, Empress Tirunesh, succumbed to tuberculosis, aged only 25, leaving Alamayou an orphan. Historians differ in their views on the removal of the Prince from his homeland. Some suggest the Empress lobbied Napier to keep Speedy away from her child and herself. The surviving accounts are nearly all British and paint another picture – one that was readily believed by the Queen.

Alamayou’s plight was romanticised by Victorian England. One newspaper dubbed him ‘England’s Royal Foundling’, and by the time he arrived at Plymouth in July 1868 he was a celebrity. Crowds gathered at his every appearance and blanket press coverage of his arrival was eagerly lapped up.

Victoria was no exception. The Prince moved in with Speedy and his wife Cornelia at their home, Afton Manor, Freshwater, on the Isle of Wight, just 15 miles from Osborne, and the Queen issued an immediate request to meet the new arrival.

After his first visit on the evening of 16 July, Alamayou and Speedy stayed on the royal estate at Osborne Cottage. The following day the Prince was brought to see Victoria. ‘He was so nice & gentle,’ she wrote in her journal. ‘He took a peach, which I gave him, & seemed to enjoy eating it very much.’

The Queen was given an account of what Alamayou had been through: ‘Capt: Speedy said that the poor child had a recollection of the horrible massacre of the captives by his father’s hand & orders, having heard the shrieks.’ Speedy also gave the Queen his version of how he came to look after the Prince, which clearly touched Victoria’s heart:

There appears to have been madness in the family. When the poor mother was dying, she asked Capt: Speedy whether he bore her & Theodore any ill will. He replied no, & that he much regretted Theodore not having made peace, whereupon she said ‘then will you be a father to my Boy?’ which he promised he would. Nothing could be kinder than he has been to the child, quite like a mother. I have written strongly against Alamayou being removed from Capt: Speedy’s care.2

After the two-day visit, a besotted Victoria sent a detailed account of Alamayou and his minder to her eldest daughter Vicky:*

The poor little boy a dear, gentle, pretty, intelligent little darling of seven years old, clings to him like an infant to its mother or nurse – can’t bear him out of his sight, sleeps near him, and sometimes even in his bed – as he is very nervous, and seems to have dreadful recollections of the murder of those people whom his father killed.

To a modern mind the idea of Speedy sharing a bed with a vulnerable child raises all kinds of concerns, but the Queen saw only the purest of motives:

Captain Speedy is really like the tenderest mother to him and it is quite touching to see this great man of 6 foot 6 inches (!!) leading about this little child! The poor mother asked him to be a father to her child when she was dying.3

During the first visit the Queen commissioned Jabez Hughes, a local photographer based at Ryde on the Isle of Wight, to photograph the Captain and the Prince, both wearing Abyssinian dress and with a round shield in front of them. The same month she invited the artist Reginald Easton to produce a watercolour miniature on ivory of Alamayou in his native dress. The sensitive portrait was exhibited at the Royal Academy’s annual exhibition in 1869 and is still in the Royal Collection.

In May 1869, Victoria noted in her journal:

Saw Capt: Speedy with little Alamayou, who is so much grown & improved, looking so nice & intelligent. Capt: Speedy is going to India, where he has got an appointment, and is going to take the dear little boy with him.4

Starting life anew in the subcontinent, the childless Speedys felt Alamayou had ‘entwined himself around our hearts’ and was ‘the best boy in the universe’. What they hadn’t banked on was the attitude of Gladstone’s new Liberal government and in particular that of Robert Lowe, Chancellor of the Exchequer. Lowe felt the little prince’s future was a matter for them and in a letter to the PM argued, ‘We are in loco parentis and ought to look after his welfare as if he were our own child.’5 He ordered Captain Speedy to send Alamayou back to England to start his formal education there. The Captain himself returned and pleaded in person to Gladstone and the Queen. A furious Victoria offered to pay for a private tutor so the boy could remain in India but found herself overruled by her ministers, and Alamayou was sent to a succession of private schools including Cheltenham and Rugby. Although he enjoyed sport he had little interest in studying and became depressed and isolated.

A series of photographs in the Royal Collection show Alamayou during his childhood and early teens. He is dressed to look a quintessentially British aristocrat in Lord Fauntleroy velvet knickerbockers and later in a woollen suit, clutching a bowler hat and gloves, and his sad expression in the photographs seems to testify to his confused emotions.

His Abyssinian grandmother wrote to him, begging for him to return, in letters he is thought not to have seen in case they distressed him. She also wrote, grandmother to grandmother, to Victoria: ‘I humbly kiss your Majesty’s hand. Three of my children have lost to death. Now only Dejazmach Alemayehu is left. I implore you look well after him.’6

The Queen continued to monitor the Prince’s education and general development. Each summer she invited him to stay with her at Balmoral where he went out daily with the keepers and said the Highlands reminded him of his home. The Court Circular tells us he went to the local Braemar Gathering, which the modern-day Royal Family still attends.

In 1878 he was taken out of Rugby to begin an officer’s training course at Sandhurst, but once again he was unhappy and asked if he could resume his studies with his old Rugby tutor Cyril Ransome, father of the Swallows and Amazons writer Arthur Ransome. By this time Ransome was a history professor at the Yorkshire College, now Leeds University, and Alamayou went to live with him at his home in Far Headingley, 3 miles north of the city.

The 18-year-old Prince had barely resumed his studies when, according to Ransome, he committed ‘a foolish act (he went to sleep in the WC in the middle of a cold night)’. He contracted pneumonia, which developed into pleurisy, and despite the ministrations of several doctors, and after a six-week struggle, the Prince died on 14 November 1879.

The Queen, on the Balmoral estate, recorded Alamayou’s decline in a series of entries in her journal from the end of October. She instructed Sir John Cowell, Master of the Household, to visit Alamayou and noted the courtier ‘found him very ill, but quite pleased to see him’.

Victoria’s sadness at the young man’s death is clear from her entry for the 14th:

Very grieved & shocked to hear by telegram, that good Alamayou passed away this morning. It is too sad! All alone, in a strange country, without a single person or relative, belonging to him, so young, & so good, but for him one cannot repine. His, was no happy life, full of difficulties of every kind, & he was so sensitive, thinking people stared at him on account of his colour, that I fear he would never have been happy. Everyone is sorry.7

The Queen arranged for Alamayou to be buried at Windsor, and Ransome accompanied his body from Leeds to Berkshire. The service was held at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, with Ransome, Cowell, the Chancellor of the Exchequer Lowe and the Queen’s son-in-law Prince Christian present. A floral tribute from Victoria with the message ‘This wreath is a mark of affection and friendship from the Queen’ was placed on the oak coffin. Afterwards the remains were interred in a specially built brick vault outside the west entrance in the Horseshoe Cloister.

On her return to Windsor the Queen visited the chapel and selected a spot for a brass plaque to be placed to commemorate the Prince with the words, ‘I was a stranger and ye took me in.’ At the same time she commissioned the sculptor Francis Williamson to create a brass bust of Alamayou based on a cast made after death. It is now in the Durbar Corridor at Osborne House.

In 2007 the Ethiopian Government requested the return of Alamayou’s remains, to be interred in the land of his birth. At the time it was confirmed that Elizabeth II’s representatives at Windsor were considering the request. To date, the young Prince of Abyssinia’s body still lies on the royal estate, a quarter of a mile from where Victoria, his benefactress, was also interred.

Notes

1RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ (W) Thursday 16 July 1868 (Princess Beatrice’s copies). Retrieved 8 January 2018

2RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ (W) Friday 17 July 1868 (Princess Beatrice’s copies). Retrieved 8 January 2018

3Fulford, Roger (ed.): Your Dear Letter: Evans Brothers: 1971: pp.202–3

4RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ (W) Thursday 6 May 1869 (Princess Beatrice’s copies). Retrieved 9 January 2018

5Marsden, Philip: The Barefoot Emperor: HarperCollins: 2007: pp.342–3

6Ibid.: p.344

7RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ (W) Friday 14 November 1879 (Princess Beatrice’s copies). Retrieved 9 January 2018

*Victoria, 1840–1901, Princess Royal of Britain, wife of ‘Fritz’, the future Emperor Frederick III of Germany.

4

‘THIS IS ME!’

BARNUM, THE GREATEST SHOWMAN, FAILS TO IMPRESS THE QUEEN

P.T. Barnum with ‘General Tom Thumb’.(National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution)

IN THE spring of 1844 Victoria and her family had three encounters with the American impresario P.T. Barnum (1810–91) and one of his legendary acts, Charles Sherwood Stratton (1838–83), better known as ‘General Tom Thumb’ – a dwarf who had achieved fame as a performer. While the Queen appears to have been besotted with the latter, she was less than impressed with the showman himself, especially after it became clear he had deceived her.

When P.T. Barnum arrived in London in 1844 with General Tom Thumb (billed as ‘the Smallest Person that ever Walked Alone’) this novelty act didn’t enjoy the success the promoter hoped for. He soon decided he needed the ultimate publicity coup – an audience with the Queen. The 25-year-old monarch was a regular theatre-goer, and her presence at any performance guaranteed maximum publicity and a knock-on effect in terms of seat sales.

There was only one problem. The court was in mourning following the death of Prince Albert’s father, Ernest I, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, who had died on 29 January 1844. The Queen’s rigid observance of mourning, including a ban on all forms of entertainment for the duration, helped mould an image of respectability for the monarchy, in contrast to the louche, hedonistic lifestyle of her Hanoverian predecessors.

Undeterred, Barnum called on the Hon. Edward Everett, the American Minister to London. The two men dined together and Everett was introduced to the boy Stratton.

While he waited and hoped for a royal invitation, Barnum concentrated on wooing the next best thing, the London-based aristocracy. A few days after his first meeting with Everett, Barnum and Stratton headed for the Piccadilly mansion of Baroness Rothschild, wife of the richest banker in the world. To his delight, Barnum was discreetly handed a well-filled purse on his departure, prompting him to reflect later, ‘the golden shower had begun to fall’.

Then, just when he felt a royal summons was out of the question, Barnum was invited to breakfast at Everett’s house. A second guest was Charles Murray, Master of the Queen’s Household, who was no doubt testing the waters to see if Barnum was a suitable character to be presented to the Queen. Murray asked the impresario what his plans were. The latter shrewdly said he was off to France to show General Tom Thumb to King Louis Philippe, who would thus glimpse Barnum’s young charge before the British Royal Family did. The showman added, ‘though I should be glad to remain if the General could have an interview with the Queen … such an event would be of great consequence to me.’1

Barnum’s ruse worked and the following day a uniformed messenger arrived with an invitation for the celebrity pair to see the Queen at Buckingham Palace on the evening of 23 March 1844. At Victoria’s request, the General was asked to appear before her as he would for anyone else – in other words, without being restrained by royal protocol and etiquette. The royal appointment meant Barnum had to cancel one of his nightly performances at the Egyptian Hall, the venue in Piccadilly where his diminutive star was appearing. Not one to miss a chance for self-promotion, the impresario attached a placard to the theatre door, which proclaimed, ‘Closed this evening, General Tom Thumb being at Buckingham Palace by command of Her Majesty.’

At the palace, the Lord-in-Waiting instructed them to address the Queen only via him and not directly, and that on leaving the audience they needed to walk backwards from the royal presence. In the event both instructions fell by the wayside.

The meeting took place in the Queen’s Picture Gallery, where Victoria and Albert were gathered with her mother, the Duchess of Kent and twenty or thirty members of the Royal Household. ‘They were standing at the farther end of the room,’ recalled Barnum in his memoirs, ‘and the general walked in like a wax doll gifted with the power of locomotion.’ The royal party showed ‘surprise and pleasure’ at the ‘remarkable specimen of humanity so much smaller than they had evidently expected to find him. The General marched forward, bowed and said: “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen!”

‘A burst of laughter followed this salutation. The Queen, dressed in a plain black mourning dress with no jewellery, then took him by the hand, led him about the gallery, and asked him many questions.’ The General’s direct responses to the questions amused Victoria. He told her the Picture Gallery was ‘first-rate’ and asked if he could meet the Prince of Wales. The Queen explained her 2-year-old son had retired to bed but that he could meet him on a future occasion.

After performing some of his songs, dances and impersonations, and having a quick chat with Prince Albert, the General and his mentor were permitted to leave. Meanwhile, after speaking to the Queen via an intermediary as requested, Barnum ignored protocol and spoke directly to the monarch: ‘I suppose the Lord-in-Waiting was seriously shocked, if not outraged, when I entered directly into conversation with Her Majesty. She, however, seemed not disposed to check my boldness, for she immediately spoke directly to me.’

The American guests had then to perform the tricky manoeuvre of walking backwards from the royal party. The fact that the Picture Gallery is 47 metres long and quite narrow, and the royals were at one end, meant it was altogether a lengthy process. ‘We had a considerable distance to travel,’ recalled Barnum:

and whenever the General found he was losing ground, he turned around and ran a few steps, then resumed the position of ‘backing out,’ then turned around and ran, and so continued to alternate his methods of getting to the door, until the gallery fairly rang with the merriment of the royal spectators.2

Victoria’s poodle, excited by all the running around, started to bark. The General, ‘however, recovered immediately, and with his little cane commenced an attack on the poodle, and a funny fight ensued which renewed and increased the merriment of the royal party.’ While Barnum and Stratton enjoyed a buffet supper, the Queen sent a courtier to enquire if the child star had been upset by the battle with her pet dog.

Victoria’s account of the visit in her journal shows her delight at the General and her disquiet about how Barnum treated him:

After dinner we saw the greatest curiosity, I, or indeed anybody ever saw, viz: a little dwarf, only 25 inches high & 15 lb in weight. No description can give an idea of this little creature, whose real name was Charles Stratton, born they say in 32, which makes him 12 years old.

Barnum’s duplicity is clear since Stratton was in fact born in January 1838, making him only 6 at the time of the visit:

He is American, & gave us his card, with Gen: Tom Thumb, written on it. He made the funniest little bow, putting out his hand & saying: ‘much obliged Ma’am’. One cannot help feeling very sorry for the poor little thing & wishing he could be properly cared for, for the people who show him off tease him a good deal, I should think. He was made to imitate Napoleon & do all parts of tricks, finally, backing out the whole way out of the Gallery.3

She would have no doubt been concerned to hear that Barnum sought out the courtier responsible for writing the daily Court Circular, detailing the Queen’s activities. According to the showman, the member of the Household ‘promptly acceded to my request for such a notice as would attract attention. He even generously desired me to give him an outline of what I sought, and I was pleased to see afterwards, that he had inserted my notice verbatim.’

The Court Circular for Monday 25 March, which appeared in The Times (and in those days many regional newspapers also carried the entry), read:

The American dwarf, ‘General Tom Thumb’, accompanied by his guardian, Mr P.T. Barnum, of New York, had the honour of attending at the Palace in the evening, when the General exhibited his clever imitations of Napoleon, & c., which elicited the approbation of her Majesty and the royal circle.

The Queen requested a second visit, which took place in the Palace’s Yellow Drawing Room on 1 April. This time the General remarked to the Queen ‘that he had seen her before’, adding, ‘I think this is a prettier room than the picture gallery; that chandelier is very fine.’ The Queen took him by the hand and said she hoped that he was well, to which he replied, ‘Yes Ma’am, I am first rate.’ She added, ‘General, this is the Prince of Wales.’ ‘How are you Prince?’ said Stratton, shaking 2-year-old Edward by the hand, before standing alongside him and remarking, ‘The Prince is taller than I am, but I feel as big as anybody.’ The Queen also introduced him to her daughter, the Princess Royal, and to the Queen of the Belgians.4

Victoria mentioned Stratton in her journal with no mention of Barnum at all: ‘Saw the little dwarf, in the Yellow Drawingroom, who was very nice, lively, & funny, dancing & singing wonderfully. Vicky & Bertie were with us, also Mama … Little “Tom Thumb” does not reach up to Vicky’s shoulder.’5

On the General’s third visit to the Queen, Victoria was joined by her uncle, King Leopold of the Belgians. She asked the General what song he would like to sing and he promptly replied, ‘Yankee Doodle.’ Despite its links with the American War of Independence, the amused monarch said, ‘That is a very pretty song, General. Sing it if you please.’6 This time the Queen’s account of the meeting was cursory to say the least: ‘at 6, we all saw the dwarf, whom our guests were much surprised at. He appeared in different costumes.’7

Victoria’s interest in the American visitors began to attract criticism in the press. The radical journal Punch observed archly, ‘It appears that the dwarf General Tom Thumb and his showman – “guardian” lisps the Court Circular – have been to Buckingham Palace, commanded thither by Her Majesty the Queen, whose admiration of genius, native or foreign, has passed into a proverb.’ The same magazine viewed the second visit by Barnum and Stratton ‘with due gravity’ and it made great play of the report in the Court Circular that the Queen had given the General presents ‘with her own hands’, including a mother of pearl and gold pencil case. Even the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, thought she was being indiscreet. There had been no dwarves at court since the death of Coppernin, who was employed by George II, and many felt the presence, even fleetingly, of a dwarf for entertainment was a disturbing image.8

If Victoria was aware of the criticism, she chose to ignore it. Over the next few years, in the wake of Barnum, a series of performances by those of restricted growth were held at various galleries across London. Victoria declined to see many of them, including the ‘Boshie Men’, bushmen from Africa. In May 1846 she did allow a family of Scottish dwarves, two brothers and a sister, named Mackinlay from the county of Ross, to dance for her, Prince Albert and the Duchess of Kent.

Three years later we hear of what may have been her final such encounter. On the evening of 21 February 1849 she wrote:

After dinner we saw Jean Hannema, a most wonderful little Dutch dwarf, 10 years old & only 2 ft. & 4 inches high (3 inches smaller than Tom Thumb) weighing only 16 lbs!! He is a nice, well behaved, intelligent little creature, & speaks very funnily, & rather broken English. His father who was there is a respectable apothecary from Friesland, having had 3 other dwarf children, who are dead, but also 3 of a usual size, who are alive. The little boy danced, & performed all sorts of little tricks.9