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- Herausgeber: The History Press
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
Queen Victoria was the longest reigning monarch in British history. In this concise biography, Lady Longford, long recognised as an authority on the subject, gives a full account of Queen Victoria's life and provides her unique assessment of the monarch. Victoria ascended the throne in 1837 on the death of her uncle William IV. In 1840 she married her first cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, and for the next twenty years they were inseparable. Their descendants were to succeed to most of the thrones of Europe. When Albert died in 1861 Victoria's overwhelming grief caused her to almost withdraw from public life for several years. This perceived dereliction of public duty, coupled with rumours about her relationship with her Scottish ghillie, John Brown, led to increasing criticism. Coaxed back into the public eye by Disraeli, she resumed her political and constitutional interest with vigour until her death in 1901.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011
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Queen Victoria
ELIZABETH LONGFORD
Series Editor C.S. Nicholls
Highly readable brief lives of those who have played a significant part in history, and whose contributions still influence contemporary culture.
First published in 1999 This edition first published in 2009
The History Press The Mill, Brimscombe Port Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QGwww.thehistorypress.co.uk
This ebook edition first published in 2011
All rights reserved © The Estate of Elizabeth Longford, 2005, 2009, 2011
The right of Elizabeth Longford, to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 6913 3MOBI ISBN 978 0 7524 6914 0
Original typesetting by The History Press
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Chronology
1 Born to be Queen, 1819–37
2 Prince Albert: A Safe Haven
3 The Age of Improvement, 1849–56
4 Death Comes for Albert
5 Seclusion, 1861–9
6 Royal Renaissance, 1870–86
7 Jubilees Golden, Diamond and White, 1887–1901
8 Queen of the Victorian Age
Family Tree
Notes and References
Bibliography
For Frank
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Lady de Bellaigne and all her staff at the Royal Archives for permission to use the Letters and Journals of Queen Victoria, and other material in the Archives. I am particularly grateful for permission to publish for the first time the letter written by Queen Victoria to her doctor Sir Charles Locock, on the controversial subject of her daughters nursing their babies. I must also thank my agent Mike Shaw, my friend John Murray, my daughter Antonia Fraser and my granddaughter Flora Soros.
CHRONOLOGY
1819
24 May.
Alexandrina Victoria born, Kensington Palace.
1820
23 January.
Victoria’s father, Edward Augustus, fourth son of George III, dies.
29 January.
George III dies. George IV ascends the throne.
1830
George IV dies. William IV ascends throne.
1837
24 May.
Victoria’s eighteenth birthday.
1837
20 June.
William IV dies. Victoria ascends throne at eighteen.
1838
28 June.
Victoria crowned, Westminster Abbey.
1839
15 October.
Victoria proposes to Albert.
1840
10 February.
Marries Albert, Chapel Royal.
1840
Victoria, Princess Royal born.
1841
Albert, Prince of Wales born.
1843
Alice born.
1844
Alfred born.
1846
Helena born.
1848
Louise born.
Year of Revolutions, King Louis-Phillipe of France escapes to England.
1850
Arthur born.
1851
Crystal Palace built, Great Exhibition opened.
1853
Leopold born.
1854–6
Crimean War.
1855
April.
State visit by French Imperial couple, Napoleon III and Eugénie.
1857
Beatrice born.
Albert given title of Prince Consort.
1858
Princess Royal marries Prince of Prussia.
1861
14 December.
Albert dies.
1861–9
Victoria’s seclusion.
1863
Prince of Wales marries Denmark’s Princess Alexandra. Baron Stockmar dies.
1864
Prussia, under Bismarck, invades the Duchies.
1865
Lord Palmerston dies.
Victoria’s uncle Leopold, King of Belgians, dies.
John Brown brought south on advice of Dr Jenner to entice the Queen into fresh air.
1868
January.
Disraeli becomes Prime Minister.
1868
November.
Disraeli defeated by Gladstone.
Leaves from the Journal of our life in the Highlands 1848–61
published.
1869
Victoria fifty years old.
1870
Franco-Prussian War, Napoleon III defeated and forced to abdicate.
‘Royalty Question’ arises in England and there are calls for Victoria’s abdication.
1872
27 February.
Victoria emerges for first official public appearance to attend thanksgiving service held at St Paul’s for her heir’s recovery from typhoid.
1874
February.
Disraeli in power again.
1876
May Day.
Queen Victoria declared Queen-Empress of India, Britain and Ireland.
1881
April.
Disraeli dies.
1883
29 March.
John Brown dies.
1887
20 June.
Golden Jubilee Day.
1891
13 March.
Prince of Wales’s eldest son dies, leaving George V next in line to the throne.
1897
20 June.
Diamond Jubilee Day: sixty years of rule by Queen Victoria.
1898
Gladstone dies.
Boer War begins.
1901
22 January.
Victoria dies.
ONE
BORN TO BE QUEEN, 1819–37
Queen Victoria gave her name to a great era. Only the subjects of Elizabeth I and Victoria are known by the name of their Queen. Was Queen Victoria herself great? The presumption is yes. Certainly, with her 9 children, 41 grandchildren and 87 great-grandchildren, her fertility would seem greater than that of English women now alive. They called her the Grandmother of Europe.
Yet she did not quite grow to 5 feet tall nor did she outgrow her childhood’s sloping chin. And she gave Europe, through her daughters’ marriages, not only the blood royal but also the scourge of haemophilia, carried unknown to all with her own genes. Nor was her conception so much immaculate as competitive, geared to win the 1818 royal marathon race for the throne. Any saintliness that Victorians sometimes saw in their Queen’s rotund, ageing image, was never traced from her father the Duke of Kent, who married her mother only months after dismissing Madame de St Laurent, his faithful mistress for nearly twenty-eight years.
It was the death in childbirth in 1817 of Princess Charlotte, heir to the throne, that made Princess Victoria important. Her father, Edward Augustus, fourth son of George III, had made his career in the army. A successful campaigner in the West Indies, he might have reached the top but for his unpopularity due to excessive discipline, culminating in the execution of three mutineers at Gibraltar. He was retired to England, where he lived chiefly on credit until 1815, when he withdrew to Brussels to economise. Princess Charlotte and her husband Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg urged him to solve his problems by marrying Leopold’s widowed sister, Princess Victoria of Leiningen. After Charlotte’s untimely death Edward did so. The handsome pair – he tall with dyed brown hair and whiskers and blue eyes, she with brown eyes and black ringlets – were married at Kew Palace on 11 July 1818. The German-speaking Duchess had her speeches written out for her in phonetic English: ‘. . . ei em môhst grêtful for yur congratuleschens end gud uishes. . . .’ Nine months later an unwieldy caravanserai consisting of German maids, a female German doctor-midwife, cage-birds and lap-dogs hurried the heavily pregnant Duchess from the Continent to Calais – driven by the Duke himself to save money – so that England’s heir might be born on English soil. The Duchess had promised the Duke a son. But it was Alexandrina Victoria who arrived at Kensington Palace in the spring dawn of 24 May 1819.
The family’s first months together were cheerful enough. The Duke was a doting father. Intensely proud of his infant daughter, he would hold her up to his friends for their inspection, bidding them look well for one day she would be Queen of England. His friends included Whigs and even radicals like Sir Matthew Wood, populist mayor of London who was to champion the unruly Queen Caroline against George IV; and Robert Owen the socialist of New Lanarkshire Mills.
But when Christmas 1819 was over, so too was the Kents’ family life. There was nothing whatever wrong with the baby, for she had been nursed by the practical Duchess, already the experienced mother of two children by her first husband. The Duke was immensely amused and curious about this operation, for most aristocrats hired wet nurses. Unfortunately, when it came to his own health, the Duke took the wrong advice. His boyhood tutor, Dr John Fisher, now Bishop of Salisbury, recommended Devon as a cheap, healthy resort. On the way there the Duke caught a chill in the icy Salisbury Cathedral, and found the winds of Sidmouth whipped it to fever-pitch. He was persuaded to make his will by John Conroy, his equerry, and was visited by Dr Stockmar, valued German secretary-physician of his brother-in-law Prince Leopold.
On 23 January 1820 the Princess Victoria lost her father to what had become virulent pneumonia. He was followed to the grave six days later by his father George III, the Prince Regent becoming George IV. As Victoria’s uncle, he had shown bad-tempered jealousy at her christening, having refused to allow the tiny intruder to be called Georgiana after him or Charlotte after his dead daughter. She could be called after her mother. So she was christened Alexandrina after the Tsar of Russia and Victoria after her mother; but the grand ‘Alexandrina’ was shortened, and she became the humble ‘Drina’ for the first years of her life.
The new King could at least have paid for the royal exiles to return from Sidmouth but that labour of love was left to Uncle Leopold who brought them back to Kensington Palace. Admittedly Parliament had endowed Prince Leopold with £50,000 a year on marrying Charlotte. Victoria was almost certainly the heir, for what stood in her way? ‘Uncle King’, as she called George IV, would have no more legitimate children after Charlotte, and his successor William IV, another marathon runner like Edward, produced only four legitimate children, who all died. Immediately after Victoria in the line of succession came the Duke of Cumberland who was also King of Hanover, but this villainous-looking ‘wicked uncle’ was unthinkable as England’s king. So Victoria it must be. Before she became Queen, however, there were plenty of opportunities for her royal uncles to influence her, if not to finance her.
What had she inherited from her father? Nothing in the way of wealth. Only debts. And this would be one of the difficulties her mother had to cope with in her upbringing. (One of Queen Victoria’s very first acts on ascending the throne was to pay off Papa’s debts.) Mentally and emotionally she owed much to Edward. There was his strong sense of duty and discipline, often unpopular, but balanced by humanitarian instincts: he abolished flogging in his unit and founded the first regimental school. Victoria was to show both traits – the strictness and the sympathy – though she disliked schooling, regimental or otherwise, and adored the ballet. He was artistic and loved his sketchbook. So did she. His exaggerated sense of military discipline was balanced by an admirable personal sense of duty, which she and her descendants shared. At heart he was a true Hanoverian: so was she – until she married Albert.
During her first years Drina did not speak and hardly heard a word of English. All around her were musical German voices, notably those of her mother, her half-sister Princess Feodore and Fraülein Lehzen, Feodore’s governess. Lehzen’s services were passed on to Drina after Feodore got married in 1828 and left for the Continent. Princess Victoria was three before she began to learn English as a second language. It is often asked whether Queen Victoria had a German accent: the answer is no. She had a very good ear as part of her musical endowment. However, there was a certain precision about her speech that told the true story of her early linguistic experience.
What of her destiny? Her household apparently believed that she passed her childhood in total ignorance. However, even if the German attendants never breathed a word, it is hard to credit her English nurse, Mrs Brock, with such inhuman restraint. Nor did Sir Walter Scott, for example, reject the legend that a little bird had whispered to Victoria the truth. Contemporary anecdotes suggest that she must have known something. Says Princess Victoria to her little friend while playing at Kensington: ‘You must not touch those; they are mine; and I may call you Jane, but you must not call me Victoria.’1 At least she knew she was different.
Another day, while visiting Royal Lodge, Windsor, with Mama, her ‘Uncle King’ dashed up in his phaeton, ordered them to ‘Pop her in’ and was off again. It was exhilarating. She did not flinch from the rouged royal cheek, and laughed at Mama’s fear of her falling out. In reality the Duchess was terrified lest the King, put up to it by Cumberland, should kidnap the child heir. Why did the Duchess fall for the rumour of a Cumberland Plot to supersede Victoria? She was fed it by her ambitious majordomo, Sir John Conroy, who had a plot of his own. Under the delusion that his wife, Lady Conroy, shared the blood royal, Sir John treated the Duchess and Princess with familiarity, regarding himself as semi-royal. His secret plan was to become Victoria’s private secretary the moment she ascended the throne. To this end he would have to isolate Kensington completely from Windsor.
His spectacular power-plan was to have three separate results. First, Victoria always felt that her childhood was sad and lonely, cut off as she was from her natural associates in the royal family. Second, the Duchess’s reputation was unjustly and permanently besmirched by Conroy’s familiarities. Many influential people such as the Duke of Wellington and Charles Greville the diarist interpreted Conroy’s behaviour as the possessiveness of a lover. Third, an unbridgeable abyss opened in Kensington Palace between the two factions: on one side the Duchess supported by and supporting Conroy, Charles Leiningen (Victoria’s half-brother) and the spinster Princess Sophie, another Palace inhabitant; on the anti-Conroy side, Princess Victoria herself, supported solely but slavishly by Baroness Lehzen.
By the time George IV had died (1830) and William IV was on the throne, Conroy had worked out a scheme for dealing with the ever more recalcitrant Victoria. The ailing William IV would die, Conroy hoped, before Victoria was eighteen (her majority), whereupon her mother would rule as regent with Conroy at her elbow. However, two incidents had already showed the stuff of which Victoria was made.
