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- Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
'Writing about Queen Victoria has been one of the most joyous experiences of my life. I have read thousands (literally) of letters never before published, and grown used to her as to a friend. Maddening? Egomaniac? Hysterical? A bad mother? Some have said so. What emerged for me was a brave, original woman who was at the very epicentre of Britain's changing place in the world: a solitary woman in an all-male world who understood politics and foreign policy much better than some of her ministers; a person possessed by demons, but demons which she was brave enough to conquer. Above all, I became aware, when considering her eccentric friendships and deep passions, of what a loveable person she was.' A. N. Wilson
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VICTORIA
A LIFE
Also by A. N. Wilson
FICTION
The Sweets of Pimlico
Unguarded Hours
Kindly Light
The Healing Art
Who Was Oswald Fish?
Wise Virgin
Scandal: Or Priscilla’s Kindness
Gentlemen in England
Love Unknown
Stray
The Vicar of Sorrows
Dream Children
My Name Is Legion
A Jealous Ghost
Winnie and Wolf
The Potter’s Hand
THE LAMPITT CHRONICLES
Incline Our Hearts
A Bottle in the Smoke
Daughters of Albion
Hearing Voices
A Watch in the Night
NON-FICTION
A Life of Sir Walter Scott: The Laird of Abbotsford:
A Life of John Milton
Hilaire Belloc: A Biography
How Can We Know?
Landscape in France
Tolstoy
Penfriends from Porlock: Essays And Reviews, 1977–1986
Eminent Victorians
C. S. Lewis: A Biography
Paul: The Mind of the Apostle
God’s Funeral: A Biography of Faith And Doubt in Western Civilization
The Victorians
Iris Murdoch As I Knew Her
London: A Short History
After the Victorians: The World Our Parents Knew
Betjeman: A Life
Our Times: The Age of Elizabeth II
Dante in Love
The Elizabethans
Hitler: A Short Biography
First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2014 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.
Copyright © A. N. Wilson, 2014
The moral right of A. N. Wilson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
A CIP catalogue record for this book is availablefrom the British Library.
Hardback ISBN: 978 1 84887 956 0E-book ISBN: 978 1 78239 344 3
Printed in Great Britain
Atlantic BooksAn imprint of Grove Atlantic LtdOrmond House26–27 Boswell StreetLondon WC1N 3JZ
www.atlantic-books.co.uk
for
Gillon Aitken
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
PART ONE
1Authors 2Zoology 3‘It is one step’ 4‘White little slavey’PART TWO
5‘The ignorant little child’ 6‘Too hasty and passionate for me’ 7I Puritani 8Hallelujah Chorus 9‘Godlike men’PART THREE
10At war11‘Scolder and scolded’12Nerve damage13‘Arme Frau’PART FOUR
14‘The Queen’s grief still sobs’15‘I could die for ye’16‘Mein guter treuer Brown’PART FIVE
17A people detached from their sovereign18‘You have it, Madam’19‘Prostrate though devoted’PART SIX
20‘Gracious confidences so frankly given’21‘An inflammatory atmosphere’22‘You English’PART SEVEN
23‘Her excellent young Munshi’24‘What a funny little woman’25Diamond Jubilee26‘This England’27‘Vale desideratissime!’NotesBibliographyIndexACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
IGRATEFULLY ACKNOWLEDGE the permission of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II to quote from materials in the Royal Archives and for other items which are in royal copyright. Thanks are also due to David Ryan at the Royal Archives, to all the staff and volunteers in the Round Tower at Windsor, and especially to the Senior Archivist Miss Pam Clark, who not only suggested many useful lines of inquiry, but also read the entire book in typescript and made many corrections and recommendations. Jonathan Marsden, Director of the Royal Collections and Surveyor of the Queen’s Works of Art, has been consistently helpful, and I should like to thank Lisa Heighway for the care she devoted to helping with the choice of illustrations, and the openness and generosity with which she revealed the seemingly limitless riches of the royal photographic collection. Thanks are also due to Sir Christopher Geidt for encouragement and kindness.
Dr Simon Thurley of English Heritage took me on an unforgettable tour of Osborne House out of season. Dr Ruth Guilding, formerly of English Heritage (and curator at Osborne), has given me many insights into the life and tastes of Queen Victoria and of the Prince Consort. Michael Hunter, the present curator at Osborne, was helpful and welcoming.
The staff of the Bodleian Library, the British Library, the Lambeth Palace Library and the National Library of Scotland have also been unfailingly obliging. I read much of the secondary material for this book in the Humanities One Reading Room in the British Library, and the bulk of the manuscripts in the Manuscript Room, where the staff are learned and accommodating.
During much of the time that I was doing research, the Special Collections in the Bodleian Library were rehoused, at great inconvenience, I should imagine, to the staff, but the papers of nineteenth-century courtiers and statesmen still mysteriously materialized in seemingly no time at all, even in the unfamiliar setting of the Science Library in Parks Road.
The staff in the London Library were, as always, kind friends.
I am deeply grateful to Dr Horst Gehringer who so generously welcomed me to the State Archives in Coburg, to Dr M. Eckstein who helped me to decipher some of the more illegible examples of the Queen’s Alte Schrifte, and to Dr Angelika Tasler who gave me useful insights into Duke Ernst II’s musical life, and who also introduced me to the library and archive in the Schloss Ehrenberg. I am very grateful to Dr Oliver Walton, who straddles a life in the Royal Collection in England with work for the Prince Albert Society in Coburg and who has given encouragement and good advice throughout.
Alexander and Michaela Reid not only provided me with lavish hospitality at Lanton Tower but were unstinting in their generosity in allowing me full access to Sir James Reid’s scrapbooks, diaries and albums. Michaela shared all her great knowledge of the Victorian court with me while I enjoyed their hospitality.
The Marquess of Salisbury has generously allowed me to quote from the archive at Hatfield. While I was there, my researches were helped by the archivist Vicki Perry, by the assistance of Sarah Whale and by the advice of the former archivist Robert Harcourt Williams.
Hugo Vickers gave very particular help.
I owe my knowledge of German largely to the patient teaching of Ute Ormerod. It would not have been possible to write this book without her.
Gillon Aitken and Anna Stein were wonderful agents, as always. My editor at Atlantic, Margaret Stead, is like the unseen deity in the Psalms – ‘thou understandest my thoughts long before’. It is impossible to imagine a more inspirational publisher. Tamsin Shelton has been a punctilious and patient copy-editor.
A biography of Queen Victoria is not a task undertaken lightly. The process is a long time in the gestation, as well as in the writing. This book owes much to conversations which I had long ago, often with friends who, alas, are no longer with us. I was especially fortunate to have Elizabeth Longford as a friend. Her biography, Victoria R.I. (1964, revised 1987), is a gigantic achievement which will never be replaced. Often, in the course of writing my own book, I recalled conversations I had with her, either at Osborne House, during a memorable autumn of 1988, or on subsequent occasions in London. I have also been helped, not only by frequent reference to his biography of Disraeli, but also by memories of conversations with Robert Blake. The following have all in different ways helped, either with specific answers to queries or with their knowledge of Queen Victoria, her court or her ways, or with questions which it had not occurred to me to ask, but which set me off on trails of fruitful inquiry: Davina Jones, Anna Keay, Antonia Fraser, Rebecca Fraser, Flora Fraser, my brother Stephen Wilson, the late Gerard Irvine, Lawrence James, Roy Strong, the late Kenneth Rose, Mary Miers, Richard Ingrams, Michael Hall, Rachel Woollen, Allan Maclean of Dochgarroch, Katherine Duncan-Jones, Jane Ridley, Sarah Bradford, A. D. Harvey, John Martin Robinson, Claire Whalley and Susie Attwood.
ILLUSTRATIONS
1.
Charles Brocky portrait of Queen Victoria, 1841. Courtesy of Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2014.
2.
Queen Victoria and Prince Albert when in their thirties. Courtesy of Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2014.
3.
Queen Victoria reading to her grandchildren. Courtesy of Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2014.
4.
Victoria, Duchess of Kent, with Prince Alfred and Princess Alice. Courtesy of Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2014.
5.
Miniature of William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne. Courtesy of Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2014.
6.
King Leopold I. Courtesy of Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2014.
7.
Prince Albert’s intimate circle. Courtesy of Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2014.
8.
The Prince of Wales as a young man. Courtesy of Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2014.
9.
Princess Alice. Courtesy of Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2014.
10.
The Royal Family at Osborne in the 1850s. Courtesy of Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2014.
11.
‘The Allies’. Courtesy of Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2014.
12.
The mausoleum at Frogmore. Courtesy of Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2014.
13.
Young royals in mourning. Kindly provided by Sir Alexander and Lady Michaela Reid.
14.
Queen Victoria and the Empress Frederick. Courtesy of Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2014.
15.
Queen Victoria and some of her adult children. Courtesy of Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2014.
16.
Princess Beatrice and Queen Victoria in the library. Courtesy of Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2014.
17.
Queen Victoria with Prince Arthur and Princess Margaret of Connaught. Kindly provided by Sir Alexander and Lady Michaela Reid.
18.
A family reunion at Coburg. Courtesy of Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2014.
19.
Lord Palmerston. Courtesy of Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2014. Prime Minister Disraeli. Courtesy of Corbis. Third Marquess of Salisbury. Courtesy of the Marquess of Salisbury/ Hatfield House. Prime Minister Gladstone. Photo by William Currey/© National Portrait Gallery, London.
20.
Queen Victoria wearing fur stole. Courtesy of Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2014.
21.
Duke of Cambridge. Courtesy of Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2014.
22.
Sir Henry Ponsonby. Courtesy of Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2014.
23.
Sir James Reid. Kindly provided by Sir Alexander and Lady Michaela Reid.
24.
Dr Norman Macleod. Courtesy of Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2014.
25.
Four generations. Courtesy of Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2014.
26.
Queen Victoria with one of her beloved dogs. Courtesy of Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2014.
27.
John Brown. Courtesy of Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2014.
28.
Queen Victoria with Abdul Karim. Courtesy of Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2014.
29.
‘The Queen of Sheba’. Kindly provided by Sir Alexander and Lady Michaela Reid.
30.
The Queen’s bedroom at Osborne House. Courtesy of Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2014.
31.
An elderly Queen Victoria. Courtesy of Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2014.
PART ONE
ONE
AUTHORS
ONE GUSTY APRIL day in 1838, Thomas Carlyle was walking in Green Park, near Buckingham Palace in London, when he saw the young Queen ride past in her carriage. Forty-two years old, the Scotsman had been living in the English capital for a little over three years, and he had lately soared to literary fame. His study of The French Revolution had been published in the previous year – the year in which Victoria was acceded to the throne – and the popularity of the two events was not disconnected. Carlyle had made what his first biographer, J. A. Froude, called a ‘vast phantasmagoria’1 culminating in the French people getting rid of their monarchy.
The English were not minded, in any very organized sense, to do the same, but Victoria became queen in hungry times. The monarchy had not been popular in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Froude noted that ‘the hungry and injured millions will rise up and bring to justice their guilty rulers, themselves little better than those whom they throw down’.2
Britain in those days was very far from being a democracy. It was governed by an oligarchy of aristocratic, landowning families. Its stability as a state depended upon the functioning of the law, the workings of two Houses of Parliament, the efficiency of the army and navy, and the balance of trade. Parliament was representative, not democratic. That is, the members of the Commons were not elected by the people, but by a small number of men of property. In the reign previous to Victoria’s, that of her uncle William IV, the Reform Bill of 1832 had done a little to extend the franchise and to abolish the more grotesque of the electoral anomalies – the so-called Rotten Boroughs, in which there were only a handful of electors. But the members of the Commons were not elected by more than a tiny handful of those whom they represented. Checking and approving the deliberations of the Commons was the function of the Upper House, the Lords, some hundred or so rich men who owned most of the land, and exercised most of the power, in Britain.
There had, as yet, been no French-style revolution to overthrow these arrangements. And it was to be the care and concern of the British governing classes to make sure that no such revolution occurred. The previous old King, William IV, having had a dissolute life and fathered ten children out of wedlock, died legitimately married and reconciled to God, murmuring the words, ‘The Church, the Church.’
The twin institutions of the Church of England and the monarchy clearly played a vital role in the delicate balance of the British Constitution. The Victorians liked to tell one another that the monarch was simply a figurehead, kept in place by the Whig landowners, a figure who signed state papers and gave the nod to the deliberations of the House of Lords. This was not really the case. The monarch still occupied a position of real power in Britain, and if that power were to be exercised recklessly, or if the monarchy were hated by a hungry populace, there was no knowing what anarchy would ensue. The monarch depended upon the peerage; the peerage depended upon economic prosperity, and upon the rising commercial classes who could provide it; the shared powers of Trade, Land, the Law and the Church were all delicately, and not always obviously, interwoven in the destinies of that young woman glimpsed in the park by the historian. It was essential for her future that the other institutions should continue to support her; it was essential for all of them that she should maintain the status quo, that she should not fail.
Victoria’s grandfather, King George III, a monarch who was politically active and who had played a pivotal role in the shaping of British political history, was blind for the last ten years of his life, and at sporadic intervals in the last twenty years of his long reign (1760–1820) he had been raving mad. The fear that the royal madness was hereditary was ever-present in the British governing class, and the young Queen’s ministers watched every one of her tantrums, each emotional display, every instance of irrational behaviour, with anxiety.
George III’s son, who ruled as Regent during the times of blindness and madness, had been extremely unpopular, not least because of the sordid and cruel way in which he had divorced his queen, Caroline of Brunswick. By the time he was succeeded by his brother the Duke of Clarence (William IV) in 1830, it had looked very much as if the supply of possible heirs to the throne had all but dwindled. It was mere luck that William had not, in turn, been succeeded by his extremely unpopular brother Ernest, Duke of Cumberland, a scar-faced brute who was widely believed to have murdered his valet and married a woman who had killed her previous two husbands, and whose extreme Toryism made him hated by the masses.3 Had the young Victoria not existed, Ernest would have been the King of England, and Britain might well have made a second decision to become a republic.
Carlyle himself was by way of being a republican, certainly one deeply read in the era of the first Republic in the seventeenth century, and a hero-worshipping biographer of Oliver Cromwell. Carlyle was a sardonic and amusing man, whose stock in trade was a refusal to be impressed – by the English, who to his Scottish soul were ever alien; by the Establishment, which he found laughable; by the class hierarchy, very near the bottom of which he had been born. His hero was the German poet Goethe, and Carlyle sought, in the confused state of modern England, with its great social injustices, its teeming poor, its disease-ridden industrial cities, its Philistinism, some means of returning, with that poet, a positive attitude to life, an Everlasting Yea. Carlyle, on that breezy April day, was passed by a carriage: the Queen taking, as he said in his Scottish way, ‘her bit departure for Windsor. I had seen her another day at Hyde Park Corner, coming in from the daily ride. She is decidedly a pretty-looking little creature: health, clearness, graceful timidity, looking out from her young face… One could not help some interest in her, situated as mortal seldom was.’4
Carlyle, who went on to write one of the most magisterial royal biographies in the literature of the world – The Life of Frederick the Great – was peculiarly well placed to see the strangeness of Victoria’s position as she swept past him in the carriage. (They would not meet until years later, when, both widowed and old, they exchanged small talk at the Deanery of Westminster Abbey.)
She was indeed situated as mortal seldom was. This makes her story of abiding fascination. Her father and mother might so easily not have had a child at all. Once born, Victoria’s often solitary childhood was the oddest of preparations for what she was to become: not merely the mother of nine and the grandmother of forty-two children, but the matriarch of Royal Europe. She was either the actual ancestor of or was connected by marriage to nearly all the great dynasties of Europe, and in almost each of those crowned or coroneted figure-heads, there was bound up a political story. Her destiny was thus interwoven with that of millions of people – not just in Europe, but in the ever-expanding Empire which Britain was becoming throughout the nineteenth century. One day to be named the Empress of India, the ‘pretty-looking little creature’ had a face which would adorn postage stamps, banners, statues and busts all over the known world. And this came about, as the Germanophile Thomas Carlyle would have been the first to recognize, because of the combination of two peculiar factors: firstly, that Victoria was born at the very moment of the expansion of British political and commercial power throughout the world; and secondly that she was born from that stock of (nearly all German) families who tended to supply the crowned heads for the monarchies of the post-Napoleonic world.
The moment in the park, when two stars in the Victorian galaxy passed one another, is one of those little conjunctions which happen in capital cities. This was the era when Britain rose, for a few decades, to be supremely the most powerful nation on earth: richer and more influential than any of its European rivals, even than Russia. Thereafter, another power would emerge, formed from the coalescence of the German states, the development of German heavy industry, the building up of German military and naval might. Carlyle and Queen Victoria, like so many figures who shape a new and vibrant civilization, were outsiders, who had seemingly come from nowhere. One of the things which marked them out was an acute consciousness of Germany and its importance in the scheme of things. Mr Casaubon, the inadequate scholar married to the heroine of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, wrote worthlessly because he had not absorbed developments in German scholarship, and this was a period when it was said that only three of the dons at Oxford could so much as speak German. (It was said that the whole story of religion in the nineteenth century would have been different if the future Cardinal Newman had known German.) Yet the story of Germany, and the story of Britain, and their tragic failure to understand one another, lay at the heart of nineteenth-century history, being destined to explode on the battlefields of the First World War.
There was something else about the young Queen which, had he known it, would have made Carlyle – historian, journalist, biographer – all the more interested in her. Whether or not Benjamin Disraeli, novelist and Prime Minister, really buttered up his Queen by using the phrase ‘We authors, Ma’am’,5 it would not have been flattery alone. Disraeli’s words are always quoted as a joke, but she really was an author. Disraeli’s alleged flannel referred to her published work, Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands, published in 1868. But this publication and its sequel were but a tiny fragment of her pen’s outpouring. Her often solitary childhood made it natural for her to express her feelings in writing. There was often no one but herself to talk to. She kept journals from infancy to old age. She was one of the most prolific letter writers of the nineteenth century, that letter-writing age, and, whether she was conducting state business, or emoting about family crises, or worrying about her health, or noting the passing season, it was her custom to put her feelings and thoughts into writing. In a recent study, Yvonne M. Ward calculated that Victoria wrote as many as 60 million words.6 Giles St Aubyn, in his biography of the Queen, said that had she been a novelist, her outpouring of written words would have equalled 700 volumes.7 Her diaries were those of a compulsive recorder, and she sometimes would write as many as 2,500 words of her journal in one day.
When she died she left many volumes of journals, an historical record of political events, conversations, impressions, of the entire cast-list of nineteenth-century public life. There was scarcely a Head of State, or a bishop, or an aristocrat, or a famous writer or composer or painter whom she had not either met (reclusive as she was for much of the time) or of whom she had not formed some impression. She asked her youngest daughter, Princess Beatrice, to transcribe these, and to omit any details which might be upsetting to the family. The princess followed these instructions, and all the evidence suggests that she censored quite a lot, destroying her mother’s manuscript journals as she did so. Very few of the original journals in the Queen’s own hand survive.
Princess Beatrice was not alone in wishing to obliterate her mother’s writings. King Edward VII likewise left instructions to his secretary, Lord Knollys, to go through his papers upon his death. Knollys destroyed freely, especially anxious to cover up the unhappy relations between Edward and his wife, Queen Alexandra. Historians will be even sadder to realize how much of Queen Victoria’s correspondence with her wittiest Prime Minister, Disraeli, has also been destroyed. Though nearly twenty morocco-bound volumes of the correspondence survive at Windsor, the hopeful researcher discovers that nearly all of the Queen’s letters have been excised from this collection; and of Disraeli’s letters, the great majority are anodyne discussions about minor honours being awarded to now-forgotten mayors or Members of Parliament.
The compulsion felt by Victoria’s children to expunge her writings from our view leads immediately to the thought that she must have had something to hide. The reader of any modern biography of Queen Victoria is naturally hopeful that some of the indiscretions, so diligently veiled by Princess Beatrice, can be finally unmasked. Here a word of caution must be sounded. Queen Victoria was an instinctively indiscreet person. Much as she would have hated our contemporary habits of prurience, and dismissive as she would have been of a modern writer picking over the details of her private life, she was nevertheless almost compulsive in her need to share that private life with a wider public. To this extent, though she was not an ‘author’ in the sense that Disraeli might have half-mockingly implied, she was much more like Dickens and Ruskin and Proust than she was like the majority of royal personages who have a quite simple desire for privacy. Victoria was much more complex. On the one hand, she considered any intrusion into the Royal Family by the press to be an abominable impertinence. On the other hand, she was only prevented with the greatest difficulty by courtiers and by her children from publishing her version of her relationship with her Highland servant John Brown.
In our lifetime, the whole convention of discretion about the lives of royal personages has been blown apart by a succession of factors – including the willingness of some members of the Royal Family to tell all, or nearly all, to newspaper and television journalists. Clearly such behaviour would have been unimaginable, indeed horrifying, to Queen Victoria.
In December 1890, for example, she erupted with anger at The Times printing a mild story (as it happened, it turned out to be untrue) about a proposed visit to England by the Duke and Duchess of Sparta (the Crown Prince of the Hellenes, Constantine, and his wife, Princess Sophie of Prussia).8 All the newspaper had said was that the Duke and Duchess of Connaught, rather than accompanying the Queen and the Court to Osborne the previous day, would wait behind in London for the Duke and Duchess of Sparta. An indignant Victoria instructed her Prime Minister to remonstrate with that newspaper’s editor for ‘the exuberant fancy of his fashionable correspondent, who makes announcements about the Queen and Royal Family at variance with the plain unvarnished Court Circular’. Her private secretary, General Ponsonby, ‘told the Queen the newspapers put in the Royal news because they thought it pleased the Royal Family and they knew it pleased the public. Her Majesty replied with some asperity that these notes were most interfering and annoying to the Royal Personages who wish to be left in peace and do not desire their movements to be announced, and that the public were informed of all particulars in the Court Circular & could not be pleased at being misled by erroneous notices’.9
So, there could be no doubt that the queen would have deplored anything in the nature of an intrusive journalism, or history, which pried into her private life. And yet – for with interesting personalities there is always an ‘and yet’, and Queen Victoria was among the most fascinating and self-contradictory of all British monarchs – she also had a desire to write about her life for publication. Her children might cringe, but she was unselfconscious about describing the pleasures of her Highland picnics, her watercolouring expeditions, and her love of the Highlanders themselves. Of course, her published books were not confessional or revelatory in the manner of modern journalism, but her own freedom of expression and lack of caution were closer to the ‘modern’ approach than were the instincts of her children. When, in the 1920s, the ex-Prime Minister’s wife Margot Asquith began to publish indiscreet volumes of autobiography, a step had been taken in the direction of modern ‘kiss and tell’ conventions. Queen Victoria’s daughter Princess Louise (Duchess of Argyll) expressed amazement that her friend Lady Battersea was also going to publish some completely anodyne reminiscences. ‘I have been rather taken aback, for your letter says, what you assured me would not be the case, that you would publish your reminiscences. I confess I thought them charming and entertaining, for just your personal belongings and friends, but not the public. This Margo [sic] fever to me is such a pitty [sic]!’10 In another letter to the same friend, Louise wrote, ‘This letter need [sic] the flames after you have read it as I do so dislike any letters being kept these days, you will not wonder?’11
It is easy to understand the reluctance of King Edward VII to have all the details of his private life recorded. He had only narrowly avoided being cited in divorce courts as a co-respondent on more than one occasion, and the King, who was nicknamed Edward the Caresser, was a by-word for raffish behaviour. Princess Louise, herself trapped in an unhappy marriage to a homosexual, her name ‘linked’, as journalists say, to several men not her husband, and desperately lonely in her widowhood, was understandably touchy about vulgar publicity.12 But it would be a mistake to attribute her views to a fear of scandal. There was a sense, in the pre-1914 world, which extended in most English circles until the Second World War, of two sets of information: things which everyone ‘knew’ but which were not written down; and matters which were printable. It was not so much that the laws of libel prevented newspapers from printing stories. It was more a matter of what was and was not ‘done’. Strong conventions prevented the British public from being told, until a few days before it happened, that their King was on the verge of abdication in 1936. Yvonne M. Ward also makes the powerful point, in her Censoring Queen Victoria, that the public image of the Queen, for a good half century and more after her death, was determined by the letters which her editors chose to put into print. Arthur C. Benson and the 1st Viscount Esher, both homosexual men of a certain limited outlook determined by their class and disposition, were the pair entrusted with the task of editing the earliest published letters. It is a magnificent achievement, but they chose to concentrate on Victoria’s public life, omitting the thousands of letters she wrote relating to health, to children, to sex and marriage, to feelings and the ‘inner woman’. It perhaps comforted them, and others who revered the memory of the Victorian era, to place a posthumous gag on Victoria’s emotions. The extreme paradox arose that one of the most passionate, expressive, humorous and unconventional women who ever lived was paraded before the public as a stiff, pompous little person, the ‘figurehead’ to an all-male imperial enterprise.
This atmosphere of discretion which surrounds the Royal Family has done Queen Victoria a disservice. By destroying so many of her mother’s journals, Princess Beatrice makes us suspicious that she was covering up details which would satisfy the eyes of the salacious. Certainly, it is hard to see why Edward VII would have been so anxious to buy letters from a blackmailer, ‘some of them most compromising’ about his mother’s relationship with John Brown, had he not himself believed that they would be scandalous. These matters will be discussed in their due chronological place. They are mentioned here at the outset, however, to alert the reader to the fact that there is a certain amount of the story which has been systematically censored by the Queen’s children. At the same time, it is necessary at the outset to realize that just because a letter or a diary has been burned does not mean it was either sinister or even especially interesting. On the contrary, as Princess Louise’s reaction to her old friend’s memoirs showed, the habits of discretion, the desire to burn perfectly harmless letters in order to cover their traces, might not conceal the garish secrets which the imaginations of a later generation wish to supply. The modern biographer, or the reader of modern biographies, might be so anxious to find the few hidden, or irrecoverably lost, ‘secrets’ of Queen Victoria’s life that they miss the one very obvious reason why her children would have wanted to destroy as much of her archive as possible.
To judge from the surviving letters, one feature of Queen Victoria’s written life which must have been especially painful to her family is the free and ungoverned manner in which she criticized her children – both to them directly and behind their backs. Their physical appearance, their dress sense, their capacity to procreate, the frequency with which they did so, the names they gave their children, the manner in which they brought them up were all subjected to a ceaseless and frequently far from complimentary commentary. For her son the Prince of Wales she reserved especially uncompromising vilifications, and it was hardly surprising, when he had the power to do so, that Bertie, having become Edward VII, took matters into his own destructive hands.
The fact that Princess Beatrice destroyed so large a proportion of her mother’s journals is not, therefore, a fact which demands only one interpretation: namely, a cover-up of scandals. The Queen expressed herself so forcefully, so freely, so often, that it could be this fact alone, and not any particular ‘secret’, which Princess Beatrice wished to obliterate from the history books. Luckily for us, an abundance of the Queen’s letters still survive, as do the reminiscences, diaries and correspondence of those who knew her. And it is from this primary material in general that the following pages will, wherever possible, derive, as we revisit the story of that ‘pretty-looking little creature’ glimpsed by Carlyle in Green Park; for we would echo his instinctual judgement, ‘one could not help some interest in her’.
TWO
ZOOLOGY
THE STORY STARTS in Germany. ‘Why should we have Germans to rule over us?’ drawled Lady Jersey at a party in 1820.1 And many of the British biographers and historians who have written about Queen Victoria have clearly shared the prejudice, usually wishing to point out that the German principalities or duchies which serviced so many European dynasties were smaller than English counties. The size of the Duchy of Gotha or of Saxe-Coburg might be of geographical interest, but it should not blind us to the way in which European royalty actually functioned. It has been rightly pointed out that until the French Revolution and the ending of the Old Regime, Europe was ruled by a single family divided into many branches, the big family of European dynasties. European royalty were all part of one family, both in the sense that they constituted a sort of political trade union, and in the genealogical fact that they were often interconnected many times over by ties of blood and marriage.2
After the Second World War, it became even easier for British historians than it was for Victoria’s insular aristocratic contemporaries to imagine that the British monarchy was a self-sufficient, home-grown norm, and to speak of the arrival of ‘foreign’ spouses for British monarchs as an exotic whim or a regrettable necessity. Although the Tudor dynasty was to some extent ‘home-grown’, the British monarchy thereafter could have no life detached from the European mainstream, especially after its own domestic civil wars. Once these had been eventually resolved, with a victory for the Whiggish aristocracy in 1688, and once it had been decided firmly in 1701, with the Act of Settlement, that the British monarchy must be Protestant in perpetuity, it became essential to find British monarchs among the Protestant members of the European royal ‘pool’. Victoria’s grandfather, George III, was the first Hanoverian monarch to have been born in England, and her nearest non-German ancestor on her father’s side was the daughter of James I – Elizabeth of Bohemia (1596–1662), and she was not English, but half Scots and half Danish. Obviously enough, her mother being German, all Victoria’s maternal ancestors were Germans.
Victoria cherished her German ancestry. ‘It shocks the people of England that the Queen takes no notice of her paternal relations, treats English ones as alien and seems to consider her German uncles and cousins as her only kith and kin,’ complained the diarist Charles Greville in 1840. The following year, when her first son was born, the Queen tried to persuade the College of Arms to quarter the royal arms of England with those of his distinguished European forebears and his arms were gazetted as those of the Duke of Saxony – one of the titles which she bestowed (with what legitimacy some would question) upon the future Edward VII.
It is understandable that members of the House of Lords and their families should have been hypersensitive about the Queen’s Germanic predilections. By European standards, the British ruling classes, although they bore coats of arms and titles, were scarcely of ancient lineage. Very few of them, by European standards, could be seen as aristocratic at all. Few of their titles went back beyond the seventeenth century. Only one of the English dukedoms, that of Norfolk, is medieval,3 and the family which bears the title, the Howards, are descended from mere harbourmasters. Even the ‘royal’ ancestry of the Stewarts was mingled with that of the Medici, Tuscan peasants who enriched themselves as cloth merchants and bankers; aristocratic purists would see even the French monarchy as the offspring of a ‘mésalliance’ over which those of more ancient or exalted lineage took precedence. W. M. Thackeray, author of Vanity Fair, dismissed Coburg as ‘a Pumpernickel state’. It is more amusing, from one perspective, to pretend that England is the centre of the universe, but it was Thackeray, and not the House of Saxe-Coburg, who is made to seem provincial by the use of the epithet.
Victoria and Albert came out of Europe, and they can only be understood in a European context. For Victoria, although she was born in England and became the figurehead of the British Empire, England was also a place of lifelong exile. She grew up as an immigrant in London. Her mother, who had imperfect English, filled her with all the immigrant uncertainties, as well as hopes; and many of her adult characteristics are based upon the classic immigrant insecurity. For example, her cunning ability to hoard wealth is classic immigrant behaviour, replicated in so many first- and second-generation immigrant families. In America, where everyone started, at one stage or another, as an immigrant, this amassing of money is popularly described as the American Dream. Not having the security of belonging, the immigrant tries to make cash a substitute for being at home. Monarchs who came before Victoria were strapped for cash because the Prime Ministers controlled the purse strings. Victoria was much cleverer at extracting money from the system than either of her two uncle-kings or her forebears had been. By lying low during her widowhood, and by negotiating extraordinarily generous allowances for her offspring from her Prime Ministers, she laid the foundation for the prodigious wealth of the present British Royal Family4 – a mixed blessing for them politically, and in her lifetime a habit which came close to being politically disastrous.
Hitherto, from 1688 to Queen Victoria’s time, the wealth of Britain had largely been concentrated in the landed classes, though this was changing thanks to the Industrial Revolution. The English ruling classes acquired armorial bearings, built themselves palaces on the ducal scale, and owned huge acreage and princely rents, all of which bolstered their status as ‘aristocrats’. But their ‘aristocracy’ had the naked purpose of acquiring and retaining power. Since 1689, there had been a very simple relation between the Whig families who exercised power and their monarchs. The English and Scottish oligarchy held the power in Britain. They did not do so, as Oliver Cromwell had unsuccessfully tried to do during the 1650s, without a monarch. But they did so having acquired monarchs from the Continent who would do their bidding – first William of Orange, and subsequently the Hanoverian Kurfürsten, so-called electors of the all-but-defunct Holy Roman Empire. Part of the fascination of Victoria’s long reign is found in her partial failure to understand this dynamic, particularly in her widowhood. Successive Prime Ministers had to teach her that she was not an absolute monarch in the continental mould. It was this fact which enabled her successors to continue in place, while those of her descendants and relations who conducted themselves as autocrats in Berlin, for example, or in St Petersburg found themselves deposed.
The British ruling class, who had beheaded Charles I and sent James II into exile, might clothe majesty with ceremony, but there was no question about who was in charge. Lenin’s fundamental political question – Who? Whom? – was easily answered in Britain in 1819, the year that Victoria was born. Who held control? The landed and titled class. Over whom? The rest of the country. The answer was slightly more complex than this, in so far as the ‘gentry’, having a firm system of primogeniture, had, since medieval times, intermingled with the mercantile and professional classes. Second sons, such as Dick Whittington, had no land or rent to inherit and had been obliged to go to the cities, usually London, to make their fortune. Following the Industrial Revolution in the closing decades of the eighteenth century, Britain had developed new ways to generate wealth, and in the years of Victoria’s reign it would turn out to be necessary greatly to expand ‘the governing class’ to include the magnates of industry and the princes of commerce. Lady Bracknell’s question – ‘Were you born into the purple of commerce or did you rise through the ranks of the aristocracy?’ – was, when it was first posed in Oscar Wilde’s play of 1895, perfectly acute from an economic and political point of view. Power and wealth are the same things, and the British political system evolved to absorb the new super-rich into the ‘aristocracy’, just as it enfranchised the growing middle classes and eventually extended the franchise to all classes. The monarchy remained part of the system – indeed, an integral part. For the older oligarchy it was a bastion against egalitarianism; for the rising crowds of ‘villa conservatives’ and working-class Tories, it was a way of maintaining a continuity with the past, and of avoiding the disruptions of political unrest such as were seen in the revolutions abroad of 1848 and 1870. Even for political progressives in England, the monarchy had its uses – its ritualized status could sanction political change even when this change was radically undermining the power of the House of Lords. (The Liberals would never have completed the extension of the franchise without a monarchy to insist that the Lords made the necessary concessions.)
So much hung on a monarchy, and much, therefore, hung upon the fitness of the monarch to occupy the throne; much hung upon her understanding of her role. Yet for Victoria herself, as for her future husband, and cousin, there was a quite other understanding of ancestry. The grand dukes and electors and princes of Middle Europe were literally veins carrying down through the history of the Holy Roman Empire the story of European governance. From infancy to old age, Victoria carried around a consciousness of the huge ‘Royal Family’ of Europe from which she sprang, and into which her children would, for the most part, marry. Particularly in her letters to her sister-in-law the Grand Duchess of Saxe-Coburg, which covered most of their grown-up lives, she showed an everlasting awareness of the existence, marriages, births, deaths and life stories of this great cloud of royalties. Throughout her reign, while her Cabinet ministers were wrestling with a changing Britain, a Britain that was expanding its overseas Empire, worrying about the future of Ireland, extending the franchise, allowing and then expanding Free Trade, building schools, reforming the army, noting with a mixture of emotions the growth of the petty-bourgeoisie and the expansion and suffering of the working class, Victoria – caught up with these facts of life as political realities – was also keeping up a constant exchange of news about kings, queens, emperors, grand duchesses, their dynastic rise and fall, their intermarriage and their place in the new scheme of things. At times, when you read this copious correspondence, several letters a week on occasion, you are listening to the monologue of a duchess in Proust. But she was no snob, and her awareness of all these royal figures, major and minor, and her interest in their doings, was one way of being aware of European political realities. Victoria, as she grew into the role of the Head of State of the most powerful country in the world, had a relationship with Europe (literally a blood relationship) which was quite different from that of her successive British Governments. While her Prime Ministers and Foreign Secretaries discussed Europe’s future, Victoria was personally related to those at the heart of such discussions. It has been well said that ‘the dispute with Lord Palmerston, for example, was famously that much worse because Victoria and Albert’s truly pan-European family connections provided a communications network rivalling, and very often interfering with that of the Foreign Office’.5 As her long reign continued, and as she developed her inherited Coburg skills as a marriage-broker, she found herself the matriarch and grandmother of the majority of European governments, and one has to use historical imagination to recall that this was far more than a ritualized symbol.
If Marx was right, that ‘the secret of nobility is zoology’,6 this is even truer of royalty. Success in breeding, which Marx saw as the key to aristocratic power and Darwin would erect into the principle of the human dominion over this very planet, lies at the heart of things. Since 1701, the British royal line had depended not merely on the ability to breed, but to breed Protestants. Bismarck, on the opposite end of the political spectrum from Karl Marx, sought to be equally offensive when he said that Sachsen-Coburg was the ‘stud farm of Europe’, but if the crowned heads of the interconnected and international monarchical system needed replenishment, such stud farms were necessary; ‘zoology’ had to be effective, and Coburg, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, was some stud farm.
Victoria and Albert’s grandmother, dynasty-builder the Duchess Auguste, was beadily aware that she was living in a new Europe. The dynastic and territorial ambitions of Napoleon lay in ruins. And marriage could bring to prominence royal personages who had not necessarily triumphed on the battlefield or inherited extensive domains. Born Auguste of Reuss-Ebersdorf, she was one of the great beauties of her age, painted by Tischbein (Johann Heinrich, the ‘Elder’). The canvas, now in the United States, depicts the eighteen-year-old Auguste, two years before her marriage, as the grieving widow Artemisia, whose great monument to her husband Mausolus gave to the ancient world one of its Seven Wonders, and to the languages of Europe the term ‘mausoleum’. When it is remembered that Auguste’s most celebrated grandchild was to become the inconsolable Widow of Windsor, there seems something prophetic about the painting of the grandmother, still in her youth, gazing mournfully at her husband’s urn. The picture was commissioned by her father Heinrich XXIV, Count of Reuss-Ebersdorf, as an advertisement of her charms on the marriage market. The somewhat porcine Franz of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld (1750–1806), heir to the dukedom of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, was so taken with her that he paid four times the asking price to the painter. In fact, he was forced into a marriage to another woman, the poor sixteen-year-old Sophie Saxe-Hildburghausen, who died seven months after the wedding, leaving him free to marry Auguste.
Once she had married Franz in 1777, and provided him with seven children, Auguste showed herself to be a matchmaker of formidable energy. In 1795, the German-born Russian Empress Catherine invited Franz and Auguste to the Court of St Petersburg, and they took along their three eldest daughters. It was said that as the three young women arrived for a ball at the Winter Palace, the old Empress and her grandson Constantine were watching them through a window. The eldest daughter, Sophie, tripped on her gown as she emerged from the carriage; the second, Antoinette, anxious not to repeat the tumble, crawled out of the carriage on all fours; the third, Juliane or Jülchen, lifted her skirts and was able to jump out without mishap. ‘All right,’ Constantine said, ‘if it must be so, I’ll have the little monkey. It dances prettily.’ Had Russia developed in a more liberal direction after the Napoleonic Wars, Constantine might well have been chosen as Emperor. In December 1825, when the mutinous troops called for ‘Constantin i Constitutia!’ (‘Constantine and the Constitution!’), the more simple-minded believed that ‘Constitutia’ was the name of his wife. Alas, his marriage to Juliane had long since dissolved when the Decembrists – those who had believed in the possibility of making Russia a constitutional system such as Britain’s – were sent to their long Siberian exile.
The marriage was not a success. Constantine ‘claimed condescensions from her, such as can scarcely be hinted at’. At fifteen, Jülchen could not cope with the sexual demands of an experienced army officer. By the time she grew up, she sought consolation from other lovers, and, even though he came to Coburg, trying to woo her back as late as 1814, the marriage was really over in 1801.
Auguste had greater success with the marriage of her son Leopold (1790–1865), who, the year after the combined British and Prussian victory at Waterloo, married Princess Charlotte of Great Britain. Charlotte was the daughter of the Prince Regent – the future George IV. She was the prince’s only legitimate offspring, and she would one day be Queen of England. Her consort would therefore in effect be king, and king of the country which of all the nations in Europe seemed poised – with its triumph over the Emperor Napoleon, with its pioneering of industrial revolution, with its expanding colonies in India – to be master of the victorious future.
Charlotte, moreover, possessed the advantage not merely of being young, intelligent and beautiful; she was also the daughter of a highly unpopular Prince Regent and niece of his even less attractive brothers. Charlotte was the nation’s bright future, the figure in whom the British people could rest their hopes.
Leopold had first visited London in 1815, during the victory celebrations after Waterloo, in the entourage of the Russian imperial party. So flooded was the British capital by visiting dignitaries that all the hotels were full, and Leopold’s first lodgings – the only rooms that could be found at short notice – were over a grocer’s shop in Marylebone High Street. This did not deter the young man, then twenty-five, from being invited to all the celebratory parties by the Prince Regent.
Leopold had inherited his mother’s good looks, and her eye for the main chance. From the ‘zoological’ point of view, the House of Coburg was a perfectly reasonable option for the British Royal Family: they were the right religion – and the Grand Duchess Catherine, sister of the new Emperor Nicholas I – had primed the pump. The Romanovs believed that the Coburgs would be useful allies to the Russians if married into the British Royal Family.7 So the wedding took place. Charlotte was ecstatically happy to be separated from her hated father and to have escaped marriage to some of the truly ugly options, such as the Prince of Orange. It would seem to have been a very happy match, and she was soon pregnant.
Princess Charlotte suffered two miscarriages, but in 1817, she appeared to be carrying a baby to full term. This was indeed the case. In the light of her previous misfortunes in pregnancy, she was laid up for several weeks before the accouchement. It was to be an important national event; Charlotte was heir presumptive to King George III’s throne and, as always happened when a birth was close to the succession, the chief officers of state were required to be present as witnesses. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Chancellor both made their way to Claremont, Leopold’s house near Esher in Surrey. The Secretary of State for War and the Home Secretary also appeared.
At nine in the evening on 5 November, a son was stillborn. The princess appeared to receive with tranquillity the knowledge that her infant was dead. She rallied, and took a little food. As evening turned to night, however, it was evident that all was not well. Charlotte complained of singing in her ears; her heart palpitated and she had violent stomach pains. She felt extremely cold, and however many blankets and hot-water bottles were provided, she shivered convulsively. Since she was haemorrhaging internally, nothing could have been more disastrous than to apply heat to her body. At 2.30 am on 6 November 1817, Princess Charlotte died.
It was an event which caused intense national shock. George III was still alive, but the question of the succession now posed itself insistently. In the immediate future, there was no danger of the line actually fizzling to nothing. Of his fifteen children, twelve survived; but the youngest of these, Princess Sophia, was forty years old, and the only hope of breeding a new heir rested with the sons. The Prince Regent – destined to inherit the throne in 1820 – was out of the running; he was long estranged from his wife, Caroline of Brunswick. The Duke of York, whose German wife was immured in the English countryside, had no hope of a legitimate child. He was fifty-four years old, and deeply involved with a middle-aged mistress. The next in line, William, Duke of Clarence, had suffered no difficulty in producing children. He had ten of them, by the celebrated comedienne Mrs Jordan, but none were legitimate. The Duke of Kent, aged fifty, had been living a quasi-marital existence, very fondly, with his French-Canadian mistress Madame de Saint-Laurent for the last twenty-four years, and even if she were to be made his lawful wife, she was too old to have children. The Duke of Sussex had twice defied the Royal Marriages Act by taking wives without his father’s consent. Neither the Duke of Cumberland nor the Duke of Cambridge, at the time of Charlotte’s death, had any legitimate successors.
The princess’s death therefore triggered a race, among the overweight, late-middle-aged sons of George III, to find a lawful wife who could become the next Queen of England, and the mother of future monarchs. The Duke of Clarence ditched Mrs Jordan and made repeated proposals of marriage to a Ramsgate heiress named Miss Tilney Long. Having been repeatedly refused, he tried a woman in Brighton called Miss Wykeham, and when she turned him down he went down the traditional royal path of seeking a bride among the royal stud farms of Protestant Germany. He selected the plain, evangelical Princess Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen, aged twenty-six. The Duke of Cambridge, aged a sprightly forty-three, joined the race by marrying Princess Augusta of Hesse-Cassel, a beautiful girl aged twenty who was a great-granddaughter of King George II of England.
Princess Charlotte’s desolated widower, Leopold, had lost not only a young wife of whom he was lovingly fond, but also his place on the royal snakes and ladders board. Having been poised to become a king in all but name, he had overnight become a royal nobody. ‘And now my poor son stands alone in a foreign country amid the ruins of his shattered happiness,’ said his mother. Leopold’s instinct, immediately after Princess Charlotte’s lugubrious funeral, was to head for home. His wise counsellor, however, the Coburg doctor Baron Stockmar, had other advice. Leopold should hang around and see what turned up. As would often prove to be the case, Stockmar’s advice was worth heeding.
In 1876, when she presented new colours to her father’s old regiment, the Royal Scots, at Ballater, Queen Victoria said, ‘He was proud of his profession, and I was always told to consider myself a soldier’s child.’8
Edward, Duke of Kent, was brought up in Kew. The Old Palace where King George and Queen Charlotte lived was too small for their numerous progeny, so Edward and William (the future William IV) were put into the hands of a governor and brought up, in some comfort, in a house nearby. When William was sent away to sea, it was decided that Edward should become a soldier, a German soldier, and he was sent for his training at Hanover. He had already, in late adolescence, developed habits of wild extravagance, and no one ever taught him the value of money.
He arrived in Hanover in 1785. The punishing disciplines of German military life – inspired by the successful military genius of Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, who was still alive – were a rude shock to the English prince, but he had no choice but to succumb to them. In 1790, he was given command of the Royal Fusiliers (7th Foot), who were posted in Gibraltar. The ‘Royals’, as they were known, had been looking forward to a light duty on the Rock. It was a shock to encounter the duke’s methods, for, as has been rightly said, ‘Germany had made him a good soldier, but it had made him a German soldier, completely inhuman and bestially severe with the troops’.9 Drills and inspections happened with great frequency. The smallest infringement of discipline was met with merciless floggings. The men were on the parade ground for hours at a time. The duke was detested by his men. By the end of the year, it was agreed in London and by his commanding officers – Lieutenant General Sir Robert Boyd and Major General Charles O’Hara – that the best way of avoiding a mutiny was to send the duke to Canada.
He arrived in Quebec in 1791. Here, he continued to be as cruel to his men as he had been in Gibraltar. The barrack square echoed to the screams of men being flogged on ‘Edward’s orders’. He pursued in person one deserter, a French soldier called La Rose, exploring mountainous country and forests before coming upon La Rose in an inn at Pointe-aux-Trembles. ‘You are fortunate, sire, that I am unarmed,’ said La Rose, ‘for if I had a pistol, by Heaven, I would shoot you where you stand.’ La Rose was brought back to Quebec, and Kent insisted upon the maximum sentence under the Mutiny Act – 999 strokes of the lash. He stood by while this punishment was administered. La Rose did not utter a whimper, and when it was over, he went up to Kent and snapped his fingers in his face: ‘That’s that. It is the bullet that should punish, my lord. No whip can cow a French soldier.’10
The duke’s Jekyll and Hyde personality became apparent when he met Julie de Saint-Laurent, a beautiful young Frenchwoman with whom he fell passionately in love, and who remained his devoted domestic companion for the next quarter of a century. They became attached while he was still posted in Gibraltar; she seems to have
