I, Victoria Read online

  Cynthia Harrod-Eagles was born in Shepherd’s Bush in London. She wrote her first novel while at university and in 1972 won the Young Writers’ Award with The Waiting Game. The birth of the Morland Dynasty series enabled her to become a full-time writer in 1979. The series was originally intended to comprise twelve volumes, but proved so popular that it was extended to thirty-four.

  In 1993 Cynthia won the RNA Novel of the Year Award with Emily, the third volume of her Kirov Saga, a trilogy set in nineteenth century Russia.

  Cynthia Harrod-Eagles lives in London, has a husband and three children, and apart from writing her passions are music, horses, wine, architecture and the English countryside.

  Visit Cynthia Harrod-Eagles online:

  www.cynthiaharrodeagles.com

  By Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  Anna

  Emily

  Fleur

  Copyright

  Published by Piatkus

  ISBN: 978-0-349-40635-0

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1994 by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  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, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  Piatkus

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DY

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Contents

  About the Author

  By Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  Copyright

  The Children and Grandchildren of Queen Victoria

  The Russian and Hessian Connection

  The Family of Victoria’s Father

  The Family of Victoria’s Mother

  WINTER

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  SPRING

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  SUMMER

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  AUTUMN

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  WINTER

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Postscript

  THE CHILDREN AND GRANDCHILDREN OF QUEEN VICTORIA AND PRINCE ALBERT

  1 VICTORIA (Pussy, Vicky) The Princess Royal b. 1840

  m. 1857 Fritz of Prussia 1831–88 (Emperor of Germany March–June 1888)

  1 Willy b. 1859

  2 Charlotte b. 1860

  3 Henry b. 1862 m. 1888 Irène of Hesse, Alice’s daughter

  4 Siggie b. 1864 d. 1866 of meningitis

  5 Moretta b. 1866

  6 Waldie b. 1868 d. 1879 of diphtheria

  7 Sophie b. 1870

  8 Margaret b. 1872

  2 ALBERT EDWARD (Bertie) The Prince of Wales b. 1841

  m. 1863 Alexandra of Denmark (Alix)

  1 Albert Victor (Eddy) Duke of Clarence b. 1864 d. 1892 of pneumonia)

  2 Georgie b. 1865 m. 1893 May of Teck

  (Their children: David b. 1894 Albert b. 1895 Mary b. 1897 Henry b. 1900)

  3 Louise b. 1867

  4 Toria b. 1868

  5 Maud b. 1869

  6 John b. & d. 1871

  3 ALICE b. 1843 d. 1878

  m. 1862 Grand Duke Louis of Hesse (who d. 1892)

  1 Victoria b. 1863 m. Louis of Battenberg

  2 Ella b. 1864 m. Grand Duke Sergei of Russia

  3 Irène b. 1866 m. Henry of Prussia, Vicky’s son

  4 Ernie b. 1868 m. Ducky, Affie’s daughter

  5 Frittie b. 1870 d. 1873 of haemophilia

  6 Alicky b. 1872 m. Tsar Nicholas II of Russia

  7 May b. 1874 d. 1878 of diphtheria

  4 ALFRED (Affie) Duke of Edinburgh (1893 Duke of Saxe-Coburg) b. 1844 d. 1900

  m. 1874 Grand Duchess Marie of Russia

  1 Young Affie b. 1874 d. 1899 of pneumonia

  2 Marie (Missy) b. 1875

  3 Victoria Melita (Ducky) b. 1876 m. Ernie of Hesse, Alice’s son

  4 Sandra b. 1878 m. Ernst Hohenlohe, Feo’s grandson

  5 Beatrice (Baby Bee) b. 1884

  5 HELENA (Lenchen) b. 1846

  m. 1866 Prince Christian of Schelswig-Holstein

  1 Christian Victor (Christl) b. 1867 d. 1900 of enteric fever

  2 Albert b. 1869

  3 Thora b. 1870

  4 Marie-Louise b. 1872

  5 Harold b. & d. 1876

  6 LOUISE b. 1848

  m. 1871 Marquess of Lorne

  7 ARTHUR Duke of Connaught b. 1850

  m. 1879 Louise of Prussia (Louischen)

  1 Margaret b. 1882

  2 Young Arthur b. 1883

  3 Patricia b. 1886

  8 LEOPOLD Duke of Albany b. 1853 d. 1884

  m. 1882 Helena of Waldeck-Pyrmont

  1 Alice b. 1883

  2 Charlie b. 1884 (from 1900 Duke of Saxe-Coburg)

  9 BEATRICE (Baby) b. 1857

  m. 1885 Henry of Battenberg (Liko) (who d. 1896)

  1 Alexander (Drino) b. 1886

  2 Ena b. 1887

  3 Leopold b. 1889

  4 Maurice b. 1891

  THE RUSSIAN AND HESSIAN CONNECTION

  MY FATHER’S FAMILY

  MY MOTHER’S FAMILY

  WINTER

  One

  28th January 1900, at Osborne

  I NEVER really liked having my photograph taken, even when I was younger – it always seemed so much pain for so uncertain a pleasure. I have always had the greatest difficulty in suppressing fits of giggles on occasions when I am meant to be solemn, and in the early days of photography one had to keep still for the camera for such a very long time. So of course one always came out looking stiff and grim, and I am not a grim person, as anyone will admit. I love to laugh, but one cannot laugh in a photograph, even nowadays when they have improved the apparatus so much. One cannot even really smile, it looks so very odd – especially when one is Queen and has a certain dignity to uphold.

  I suppose if I had ever been beautiful, like dear Alix, I should not have minded being photographed. It’s a great comfort to me to have such a beautiful daughter-in-law: she always looks lovely and serene, like an alabaster statue. She will make a dignified queen one day. (What sort of king Bertie will make is another matter – but I won’t think about that now!) I have such a great love of physical beauty – indeed, Albert thought it excessive, but having so much of his own, he was inclined to undervalue it. Mamma was pretty when she was young – regular features, dark eyes, pink cheeks, glossy curls – and my sister Feo was the image of her. But I, I must needs inherit my father’s looks, especially his nose – large and long, jutting uncompromisingly outward and curving over at the tip – and his receding chin and heavy underlip! (Often and often when I was young I was scolded because my mouth always hung a little open, but I say when a person has a heavy underlip and a particularly short upper lip, what is a person to do?) Dear Papa’s features were well enough for a man – indeed, he was thought quite good looking for a prince – but they never sat happily on me. It seems that in my physical self, as well as my inheritance, I am all Hanoverian. The slender, beautiful Coburg looks from my mother’s side passed me by entirely.

  Yet one can some
times make a surprising impression! When my granddaughter, sweet little Sophie (Vicky’s seventh), came to visit me for the first time, she described me afterwards in her journal like this:- ‘My dear Grandmamma is very tiny – a very, very pretty little girl – and she wears a veil like a bride.’ Sophie was four years old then, and I was fifty-five! It was very gratifying. A woman, even if she is a queen and has more important things to think of, always wants to be pretty.

  So it was with mixed pleasure that I spent this afternoon looking over old photographs with Thora. (Dear Thora, the most useful of my grandchildren! Lenchen is lucky to have such a daughter: she has never given anyone a moment’s anxiety in her life!) The weather today is vile, real January weather – strong winds and a heavy, sleety snow. Even carriage exercise has been impossible. It is a rare thing for me to be put off going out by the weather, but it really was impossible today – we should never have got the ponies along. Besides, it would have been sheer cruelty to make any of my ladies accompany me: they are all such hothouse flowers! and poor Jane Churchill has a nasty cold in the head. I have had a troublesome cough lately, but that is more from the damp than the cold. The damp has got into my poor old knee, too, and it aches like the memory of an old grief. Oh, the complaining flesh! The greatest tragedy about growing old is that our outsides cease to match our insides. The spirit remains willing, but the flesh shrinks back at the door and yearns towards the comfortable chair and the fireside!

  Osborne has always been a cold house in winter. Even with the most extravagant fires lit, a northeaster coming off the sea penetrates the shutters and chills the rooms, except for a little rosy space around each fireplace, where the dogs collect. Well, after all, it was intended as a summer palace, a Marine Residence to replace the Pavilion at Brighton. Albert’s clever heating scheme – blowing hot air through grilles to warm the corridors and bedrooms – was meant for counteracting the cool of a summer evening, but it does little against the icy draughts that racket about the house in winter. But I never mind the cold; in fact the older I get, the less I can bear too much heat. I know very well what my ladies think about that! I tease them sometimes, just for the fun of seeing their dismay. Once at Balmoral on a really cold day, I came down at the usual time for my outing to find them all blue-nosed and huddling together like mountain ponies, so I looked grave and wondered aloud whether it might not be too warm for going out. The silly geese took me quite seriously!

  We never had a Christmas here while Albert was alive, which is a pity. At Christmas and for weeks afterwards the house smells so beautifully of the pine and myrtle we cut to decorate the rooms, of the applewood burning in the grates, of oranges and cinnamon and cloves. Smells are the most vivid keys to memory, I always find: one sniff of this or that, and one is actually there, reliving some long-lost time as though transported bodily. Thank God I have kept that sense intact at least, though my wretched eyes are getting very bad, even with my ‘specs’ – horrid things! how I hate to wear them! If only people would write more distinct, we should get on better. I have spoken to Ponsonby again and again about it: as my secretary be should look to it. My hearing is not what it was, either – not that I am deaf by any means, but I used to be able to hear the bats shriek, when my darling and I went out walking at dusk; and I could hear a whispered conversation on the other side of a room (an ability which has often stood me in good stead: it is surprising the number and variety of things people decide one ought not to know!).

  My earliest memories are connected with smells. I can remember crawling across the carpet at Kensington Palace a yellow carpet, with red lozenges, and worn patches where the cord was showing through – and it smelled of dust and dogs. (I learned to walk long before I was a year old, so that may well be my very earliest memory of all.) I remember sitting on the floor (cold under my bottom, through a thin muslin dress – we wore so little in those days – I wonder if that is why I feel the heat so much in these better-clad times?) and holding Aunt Adelaide’s purple cloth reticule with the gold thread embroidery. The purple was so soft and the gold so harsh to my baby hands, and it smelled of peppermint, which was why I was trying to find out how to open it. Aunt and Mamma chattered in German above my head meanwhile – a sound like birds, like starlings roosting, full of little clicks and whistles, and zo! and ne? and ach! and scha-a-ade! Poor Aunt Adelaide always smelled of peppermints: she had bad teeth, so she tended to swallow great lumps of food whole, which gave her indigestion. Now I think of it, it shows what strength of character she had, to remain always so good-tempered while a martyr to dyspepsia, which is a most disagreeable affliction, and one very hard to obtain any sympathy for. A fever or a wound always arouses tender interest, but the workings of the alimentary system one would always rather not think about, especially someone else’s. Having an iron digestion myself, I’m afraid I was not always very sympathetic in the early days when poor darling Albert suffered. He and food were never really intimate friends. They tolerated each other at best.

  Aunt Adelaide was a frequent visitor in the first years of my life. When Mamma was first widowed, Uncle William encouraged my aunt to visit her every day to console her – he said that as they were both German, they would be able to talk and pray in the same language. That was like him, my blunt, kind, practical uncle! But sadly the intimacy did not last, owing to a Certain Person, who poisoned Mamma’s mind against my dear uncle and aunt. From the time I was about six or seven, I hardly ever saw them, though they continued to write to me and send me presents, and whenever I did see them, they were as kind and loving as ever towards me. But when I think of the opportunity lost – however, it’s of no use to repine over what might have been.

  Another early memory I have is of the odour of camphor enveloping me as Papa’s sister, Princess Sophia, swished past me along one of the garden paths. I must have been very small then, for I remember her black skirts scratching my face as she went by and rattling the gravel against my shoes. A faint smell of camphor always hung about her clothes, and later it was a smell I always associated with melancholy, for poor, sad Princess Sophia – one of the many ‘living ghosts’ of Kensington Palace – was in permanent mourning for her own life, her long-ago lover and her lost, secret baby. (I was not supposed to know about that, but servants talk all the time – one only has to listen.)

  Kensington Palace was a sort of royal asylum for poor relatives in those days, where they could be boarded out of the way at as little expense as possible. Uncle Sussex was another of Papa’s relatives who lived there, an extremely eccentric man who lived a life of fierce seclusion and talked to himself all the time. I remember him rushing along a passage, waving his hands as he expounded some serious point to himself (he must have been finding himself hard to convince, for he sounded quite heated!). I was terrified of him as a child, not because he had ever done anything bad to me, poor old man, but because he had been held up to me as the ultimate penalty. An earlier generation of nurses had threatened their charges with Boney, the wicked Corsican who ate little children; when I was naughty and unrepentant (which, alas, was very often!) I was told that if I did not stop screaming Uncle Sussex would come and get me!

  There was such a gust of wind just then that it made all the shutters bang against their fastenings, as if the windows behind them were nothing but space! When Beatrice was a little girl, she was once asked what windows were for, and the saucy thing answered promptly, ‘To let the wind through.’

  I wonder if she remembers that now! Poor Baby! She is sitting opposite me, her feet lifted out of the draught on a little footstool, knitting something in khaki. (We have all been knitting as though our lives depended on it: there is so little else one can do for our brave men at the Front.) She looks very handsome still, with her nice neck and pretty hands (though really I do not like the present style of dressing hair, with that front of tight curls, just exactly like a poodle and not at all flattering). It pains me to see her in her blacks, and to know that she, my youngest child, is a widow. It
is so very dreadful and pitiful, though she bears it with the greatest fortitude, and her children are, of course, a great comfort. I love to hear them running about and laughing and chattering, to know the old nurseries are inhabited again: it made me very sad when they were closed up, when Baby herself grew up and there were no more brothers and sisters to come after her. It is surprising how much noise just four children can make. If Liko had lived, I expect he and Baby would have gone on to have more, for they were very much in love; but he took it into his head so strongly to go off and fight in Ashanti (the second war in 1895, that was, of course, not the first. It seems that nothing but trouble ever comes out of Africa – so unlike dear India!). I told Liko at once that it would never do, but he would not take ‘no’ for an answer, and reminded me that he came from a family of soldiers, and that it was a worthy cause to force the King of Ashanti to give up the Slave Trade. In my anxiety I even had Reid put the medical argument to him, that the climate of the Gold Coast would certainly undermine his health; but still Liko would go, and Baby supported him, though she wanted him to go as little as I did. I was right: he lasted only a few weeks, poor creature. He took malaria in those dreadful, fever-haunted jungles, and died on the journey home. The fact was, of course, that he yearned for something noble and useful to do, and one ought not to repine when men seek the service of honour; but his loss was such a dreadful blow to me! I loved him as dearly as my own son, and he brought such enjoyment into my life, as though every day were a champagne day. Baby was not thirty-nine years old when he died, younger even than I was when I was widowed. Fate is very cruel, and one never gets used to it.

  She hears my thoughts and looks up at me as if I have spoken out loud. When people live together a great deal that is often the way. I can see that she wonders what I am writing, and whether she will be wanted to take dictation – she has done so once or twice recently when my eyes have been too tired or my hands too stiff. Yes, now she has asked would I like to dictate my journal to her, or will I write it myself? No, I say, I will write it myself. There is not much to tell today – just the weather and my health, no news of the war – but I must keep it up-to-date. She smiles and goes back to her work.